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Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

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Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#181

Post by [deleted] »

martythemaniak wrote: post #148
haberman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered a Tesla Model 3 yesterday. When I see the "Full Self-Driving Capability" checkbox at checkout time (it's an option you can pay $3,000 for right now) I just have zero confidence that they can deliver on this. Almost every other aspect of the car is fantastic. But Tesla's delusions about achieving full self-driving with their current approach just make me lose some respect for them. It makes me worried that t…

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD. Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. T…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#183

Post by h4b4n3r0 »

Fricken wrote: post #45

Right now, with HW2 Tesla is in kind of an awkward no man's land where their hardware is overkill for basic ADAS, but nowhere near enough for any kind of autonomy that allows the driver to turn their attention away from the driving task. By going to a custom ASIC with inferencing. I have little doubt about Musk's claim that it'll offer a 10x improvement over the current stripped down PX Drive2 variant for deep learni…

Still not going to work for autonomy. Expect better ADAS and nothing else. The computer vision problems they need to solve to make autonomy work reliably are not solved yet, and I would be willing to bet good money that they won’t be able to get anywhere near L5 with the sensors they install today and without a LIDAR.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#184

Post by thfuran »

mhermher wrote: post #173
tomp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question- why is LIDAR so important? Obviously it’s possible to drive without it (humans do it), so it’s conceivable that eventually machines will be able to do it as well... So I’m guessing your point is, that won’t happen anytime soon and LIDAR is the fastest way to market; can you confirm/expand/clarify?

I find the "humans can do it with eyes" argument pretty weak. Humans also have brains, which are doing most of the heavy lifting. With something like LIDAR, you're shifting more of that heavy lifting into the sensors, so that you don't have to go as deep into trying emulate the human brain in processing. It's such an obvious point.

Yeah, a direct a distance measurement is much more straightforward than the integration of all the monocular and binocular depth cues human perception relies on.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

modeless wrote: post #141
dev_dull wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the model 3 hardware modular? For example, is it possible they’ll have you bring it to the dealer in a few years and get outfitted with these new chips?

Yes, Musk said that on the earnings call. But the hardware upgrade is not the hard part of self driving. At least they have stopped claiming that their current hardware is powerful enough for full self driving already, which was a ridiculous and worrying position for them to take.

> ridiculous and worrying

I think “fraudulent” would be more accurate; it was factually false, it was at best entirely unfounded if not actually knowingly false, it was material to decisions of people to purchase the self-driving add-on.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#186

Post by throwaway648 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #171
throwaway648 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Estimating distances robustly is very important for navigation. LIDAR is accurate at relevant distances and most importantly very robust against environmental effects. Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone. Sure, human can do it somewhat well, but eye and brain are extremely complex things to implement (and it still…

>> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone. Because that isn't how people judge distances, at least not distances beyond a few feet in front of their faces. Plenty of people with only one eye do very well. It is a difficult problem because we use a variety of techniques and 'hardware' when estimating distances and spe…

Yep, we do huge amount of assumptions to derive ”model of a world” from quite limited amount of data. And we do lots of mistakes without ever realising it. Fortunately, most of those mistakes are irrelevant, and safety margins let us correct most of the relevant mistakes. Rest become accidents.

I guess the same logic applies directly to self-driving cars as well..

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#187

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway648 wrote: post #163
tomp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question- why is LIDAR so important? Obviously it’s possible to drive without it (humans do it), so it’s conceivable that eventually machines will be able to do it as well... So I’m guessing your point is, that won’t happen anytime soon and LIDAR is the fastest way to market; can you confirm/expand/clarify?

Estimating distances robustly is very important for navigation. LIDAR is accurate at relevant distances and most importantly very robust against environmental effects. Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone. Sure, human can do it somewhat well, but eye and brain are extremely complex things to implement (and it still…

> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes)

At any but very close distance, don't humans mostly use a combination of lighting cues, a priori knowledge of actual size vs. apparent size, motion parallax, and other flat-image cues instead of stereoscopy?

But, yeah, LIDAR cuts through all that, too.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#188

Post by teeteetech »

majormajor wrote: post #131
xedeon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon mentioned on the Q2 conference call yesterday that specific demo is easily doable. He also added that it would be sort of cheating, because that's a very defined route and he prefers it to be able to be much more dynamic. i.e. pick any two US cites and the car will drive you there.

Is "finding roads between two arbitrary cities" the hard part of self-driving?

I think that "using arbitrary roads" is a relatively hard part of self-driving.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#189

Post by vl »

gamblor956 wrote: post #149
xedeon wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again with the LIDAR argument... Humans drive using only eyes (computer vision) and having a sense of location (localization/3D maps). Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances. Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve…

LIDAR provides more than just distances. With full-360 LIDAR you also get object edges in 3d space, which means you can do object recognition on the LIDAR results. In other words, you get everything that vision systems would offer except color, without having to do any processing to calculate depth, so you can go straight to the object-recognition and navigation processing. LIDAR > vision systems.

Also tells you where the rain is.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#190

Post by TeMPOraL »

ethbro wrote: post #174
TeMPOraL wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be fine with letting a 10 months old walk around town unsupervised? Or drive a car?

If I trained a child to drive, I'd be comfortable letting them drive at 6. I believe I was around that age the first time I drove (handling steering, with assistance on gas / brake). My memory is that the only difficult part was a lack of power steering on hilly terrain. Same age for walking around town unsupervised: the Japanese do and don't seem to lose many. My original point was focused on the technical feasibili…

And my point is that it's not just about experience-years, it's also about the breadth of knowledge. When driving, humans do not use just the experience acquired from looking at things from behind the wheel. They also use their general understanding of physics, of materials, of concepts related to visibility, traction, not to mention expected behaviour of other people and how to read face expressions.
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