GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff • Hacker News Board

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#151

Post by CaffeineSqurr » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

It's not getting publicized very much but they did lay off people from the core AV teams (planning, controls, perception, mapping, etc.) in addition to the otherwise cited groups.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#152

Post by anyfoo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

fiftyfifty wrote: post #147

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that…

Sometimes I am speechless. You’ve just made public transport less efficient on several axis.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#153

Post by AsyncAwait » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #87

AsyncAwait wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when musk says this he gives data to back it up - that humans manage just fine with visual systems What humans do 'just fine' isn't very relevant to self-driving tech. Humans balance just fine as well and yet the state of the art for robots is quite primitive. Airplanes also don't fly like birds. > lidar is really expensive Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is effective.

>Humans balance just fine as well and yet the state of the art for robots is quite primitive. That's the whole point. Full autonomy will never truly happen until computers can do what human brains can with regards to driving. No amount of sensor technology will make up for that fact. It's a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Sure. But that doesn't mean they have to do it the same way humans do, (same as airplanes don't emulate birds) - that is you can probably arrive at a similar outcome via multiple approaches, some quite different to how the human brain works.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#154

Post by fiftyfifty » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #149

fiftyfifty wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that…

Transporting people together in a single thing is much more efficient than having a big roomy box for every person.

Agreed, I was thinking the self driving vans or mini-buses would hold maybe 10 people. They wouldn't have to be as big as a full size bus as they would come by more often, making them more convenient for the riders.

I live in a smaller city and we have full size buses that only come by every half an hour, which means if you miss a connection it could take you an hour and a half to travel a distance you could easily drive in 15-20 minutes. If the buses came by more often, more people would ride them, but that would be cost prohibitive if you had to pay all the drivers.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#155

Post by AsyncAwait » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #89

AsyncAwait wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when musk says this he gives data to back it up - that humans manage just fine with visual systems What humans do 'just fine' isn't very relevant to self-driving tech. Humans balance just fine as well and yet the state of the art for robots is quite primitive. Airplanes also don't fly like birds. > lidar is really expensive Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is effective.

> Which, again, is somewhat separate to whether it is effective. Somewhat, but if lidar was really cheap it wouldn't really matter if it was also not-necessary.

Right, I just don't know we're far enough in to definitely say what is/isn't necessary at this point.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#156

Post by anyfoo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

kgin wrote: post #130

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

We may never have 100% level 5 driving. But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out. We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass. It's possible that remote assistanc…

Can you explain this more thoroughly? So the AI cannot itself resolve a situation that requires resolution within a split second, therefore it passes control (reliable, latency free?!) to a remote operations center where humans get to... assess the situation in order to remotely tell the vehicle how to react in time? I must have completely misunderstood, because I don’t see how any part of that plan is working?

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#157

Post by Traster » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #9

Funny, as they were just a few weeks ago (even during the lockdown) certain recruiters were saying they were aggressively hiring -- and are still listed as hiring for example here: https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/ Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate. Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.

Priorities change. In 2019 people were buying into the Tesla bullshit and it wasn't a quesiton of "Will we get to driverless cars" it was "Will your driverless car be able ot make you a martini". Okay, more realistically completely autonomous driving vs autonomous busses on specific journeys etc.

It's thinking in terms of plentiful resources, versus thinkin in terms of the minimum required. You can get rid of all those guys working on the automated fur slippers, but you might want to hire a few more guys working on the automated bus doors.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#158

Post by anyfoo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #113

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.

More important than simple probability is the “expectancy value”, which is roughly spoken (and cumulatively) the probability multiplied by the effect when the probability comes to pass.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#159

Post by djsumdog » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #113

djsumdog wrote: post #86

It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…

> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.

There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.

Re: GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff

#160

Post by anyfoo » Thu, May 14, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

OpieCunningham wrote: post #132

economicslol wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.

They also said the same thing about time travel and dragons.

This might be more like turning lead into gold, which after (at least) several hundred years of effort we can do now, with merely completely absurdly uneconomic and unpractical levels of effort and energy.