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A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

waymo.com

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Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#21

Post by egypturnash »

xnx wrote: post #13
liliumregale wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.

Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop.

The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#23

Post by ACCount37 »

arjie wrote: post #10

Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it. It would just be cool to see what…

REing Meta's custom AI HW to get it running with something would be one hell of a project, and one hell of a flex.

It would rely on them being nice enough to leave at least some binaries on the thing though. Because I'm not sure how would one even get an in on how to boot the things without.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#24

Post by pnw »

egypturnash wrote: post #21
xnx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.

Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current…

I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#25

Post by tehnoslow »

The more I think about it the more autonomous cars look like extremely demanding edge computers. You have limited power and cooling, unreliable connectivity and very strict latency requirements. It's probably one of the few places where designing the hardware around the workload makes more sense than trying to make a general purpose platform do everything

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#26

Post by classictraffic »

xnx wrote: post #5

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…

FWIW they started actively testing in Chicago a few months ago. I frequently see them around town now

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#27

Post by ACCount37 »

tehnoslow wrote: post #25

The more I think about it the more autonomous cars look like extremely demanding edge computers. You have limited power and cooling, unreliable connectivity and very strict latency requirements. It's probably one of the few places where designing the hardware around the workload makes more sense than trying to make a general purpose platform do everything

A self-driving car is an "AI robotics" platform.

Both self-driving car and general purpose AI robots are emerging technologies right now. My bet is that eventually, the HW will converge accordingly.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#28

Post by trhway »

>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras

is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the same lens size as my Fuji)

If it is really a showcase of their visual pipeline than it makes sense that they are still so reliant on lidar - which is pretty expensive because of the number of rays you have to support to maintain good situation-awareness and which is still hard and expensive to scale to get good resolution. That also means that their tech can't really be put onto other platforms like drones for example.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#29

Post by cyberax »

realo wrote: post #16
cyberax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

An average bus load in the US is around 18 people. So if you just compute the raw bus emissions, then an electric bus is maybe about 2x more efficient than personal EVs.

But wait, there's so much more!

A single bus/subway ride costs about $20, which is a surprisingly consistent figure for various US cities. In NYC it's $17, for example. I'm talking about the _true_ cost, as in: "yearly operational budget divided by the number of trips". And most of this cost comes from 3-4 drivers that every bus needs, not from the hardware itself.

Price is a pretty reliable proxy for CO2 emissions for general market goods and services. And with these kinds of numbers, personal cars are competitive. Even if we factor in subsidized road maintenance cost ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ).

If we now add mild carpooling, so that a single robotaxi drives 2-3 people, then classic transit just dies. It's like comparing horse-drawn carriages with steam trains.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#30

Post by gf000 »

trhway wrote: post #28

>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the sa…

Absolutely not an expert on this, but I would imagine that they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image suddenly might cause a discontinuation in the pipeline that is harder to account for versus the ML machinery being trained to do this job as well.

Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine.

But I'm really just guessing in the dark here.

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