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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#101

Post by kevindamm »

dbt00 wrote: post #42
ActorNightly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of lidar is to prove error correction when you need it most in terms of camera accuracy loss. Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with both eyes.

(Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance, which is why so many people get simulator sickness from stereoscopic 3d VR)

Actually the reason people experience vection in VR is not focal depth but the dissonance between what their eyes are telling them and what their inner ear and tactile senses are telling them.

It's possible they get headaches from the focal length issues but that's different.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#102

Post by nerdsniper »

jmux wrote: post #85
menaerus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How expensive is their lidar system?

Waymo does their LiDAR in-house, so unfortunately we don’t know the specs or the cost

Otto and Uber and the CEO of https://pronto.ai do though (tongue-in-cheek)

> Then, in December 2016, Waymo received evidence suggesting that Otto and Uber were actually using Waymo’s trade secrets and patented LiDAR designs. On December 13, Waymo received an email from one of its LiDAR-component vendors. The email, which a Waymo employee was copied on, was titled OTTO FILES and its recipients included an email alias indicating that the thread was a discussion among members of the vendor’s “Uber” team. Attached to the email was a machine drawing of what purported to be an Otto circuit board (the “Replicated Board”) that bore a striking resemblance to – and shared several unique characteristics with – Waymo’s highly confidential current-generation LiDAR circuit board, the design of which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his resignation.

The presiding judge, Alsup, said, "this is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen. This was not small. This was massive in scale."

(Pronto connection: Levandowski got pardoned by Trump and is CEO of Pronto autonomous vehicles.)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/waymo-googles-se...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#103

Post by elliotec »

Vosporos wrote: post #96

The new frontier is manifestly the Phillipines.

Can you explain? I lived in PH, and my guess is that you mean navigating and modeling the unending and constantly changing chaos of the street systems (and lack thereof) is going to be a monumental task which I completely agree with. It would be an impressive feat if possible.

Edit: or are you talking about the allegations of workers in the Philippines controlling the Waymos: https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo... I guess both are valid.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#104

Post by elliotec »

reluctant_dev wrote: post #34
mgaunard wrote: post #13

Still needs to be trained on the final boss: dense cities with narrow streets.

San Francisco isn't uniformly dense and narrow, but it does have both, and it's run remarkably well so far.

Another comment mentioned the Philippines as the manifest frontier. SF is not on the same plane of reality in terms of density or narrow streets as PH, I would argue in comparison it does not have both.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#105

Post by hijnksforall »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #90
FL33TW00D wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely false: https://x.com/i/status/2019213765506670738 Listen to the statement. The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult situation". Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet fixed have a human intervene. Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.

Whenever something like this comes out, it's a good moment to find people with no critical thinking skills who can safely be ignored. Driving a waymo like an RC car from the philippines? you can barely talk over zoom with someone in the philippines without bitrate and lag issues.

Hacker News has had some of the dumbest Tesla takes of all time. People should be embarrassed about some of the claims that were made here.

And apparently some people still haven't caught on.

Have a look if you don't believe me:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#106

Post by dooglius »

xnx wrote: post #2

> The Waymo World Model can convert those kinds of videos, or any taken with a regular camera, into a multimodal simulation—showing how the Waymo Driver would see that exact scene. Subtle brag that Waymo could drive in camera-only mode if they chose to. They've stated as much previously, but that doesn't seem widely known.

They may be trying to suggest that, that claim does not follow from the quoted statement.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#107

Post by MillionOClock »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #82
Kapura wrote: post #74

Interesting that this should come out right as lawmakers are beginning to understand that Waymos have overseas operators making major decisions. [*] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...

Completely false: https://x.com/i/status/2019213765506670738 Listen to the statement. The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult situation". Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet fixed have a human intervene. Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.

I haven't read anything about this but I would also suppose long distance human intervention cannot be done for truly critical situations where you need a very quick reaction, whereas it would be more appropriate in situations where the car has stopped and is stuck not knowing what to do. Probably just stating the obvious here but indeed this seems like something very different from an RC car kind of situation.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#108

Post by sroussey »

etrautmann wrote: post #59
mycall wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still important for safety reasons in case someone uses a LiDAR jamming system to try to force you into an accident.

It’s way easier to “jam” a camera with bright light than a lidar, which uses both narrow band optical filters and pulsed signals with filters to detect that temporal sequence. If I were an adversary, going after cameras is way way easier.

Oh yeah, point a q-beam at a Tesla at night, lol. Blindness!

Re: The Waymo World Model

#109

Post by smallmancontrov »

tfehring wrote: post #84
smallmancontrov wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can and they do. https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=872 They've also built it into a full neural simulator. https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=1063 I think what we are seeing is that they both converged on the correct approach, one of them decided to talk about it, and it triggered disclosure all around since nobody wants to be seen as lagging.

I watched that video around both timestamps and didn't see or hear any mention of LIDAR, only of video.

Exactly: they convert video into a world model representation suitable for 3D exploration and simulation without using LIDAR (except perhaps for scale calibration).

Re: The Waymo World Model

#110

Post by mooktakim »

mattlondon wrote: post #89

Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense. I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the same way as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is a robot of sorts. Google/Alphabet are so vertically integrated for AI when you think about it. Compare what they're doing - their own power generation , their own silicon, their own data centers, search Gmail YouTube Gemini wor…

Tesla built something like this for FSD training, they presented many years ago. I never understood why they did productize it. It would have made a brilliant Maps alternative, which country automatically update from Tesla cars on the road. Could live update with speed cameras and road conditions. Like many things they've fallen behind
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