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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#211

Post by dboreham »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #201
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength. No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure,…

Last time I checked I relied entirely on vision to drive autonomously.

You have a much better GPU than it has.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#212

Post by moooo99 »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #206
vortegne wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any evidence for this claim?

I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

> But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades.

Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#213

Post by FarmerPotato »

refulgentis wrote: post #189
Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down. At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossi…

Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.

Anecdote: living in an area where Waymo is becoming mainstream, but we've been seeing their mapping cars drive around streets for five years prior.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#214

Post by [deleted] »

vortegne wrote: post #202
rhubarbtree wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system. “Vision is all you need.”

Any evidence for this claim?

[deleted]

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#215

Post by red75prime »

torton wrote: post #163
cortesoft wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.

That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.

Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#216

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #206
vortegne wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any evidence for this claim?

I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Humans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball.

It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#217

Post by dboreham »

inerte wrote: post #54
0xffff2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.

I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too. I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I…

Palm Springs from San Jose? Albeit freeway throughout but that's quite impressive.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#218

Post by FarmerPotato »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #104
girvo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius

Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.

I've been trying to fuse my stone knives and bearskins, but I fear I will never craft a tricorder.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#219

Post by FarmerPotato »

nradov wrote: post #91
catigula wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, humans are fairly poor drivers and generally can't be trusted to drive millions of miles safely.

Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.

I don't think averages work that way

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#220

Post by astrange »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #206
vortegne wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any evidence for this claim?

I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Human drivers don't use fixed cameras. For one thing, they can move their heads.

Fun fact, people can see light polarization.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4528539/

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