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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#241

Post by phainopepla2 »

breckinloggins wrote: post #55
PeterStuer wrote: post #38

Imagine driving in a Waymo 'out of a raging fire'. Talk about edge cases. But, what would you do? Trust the Waymo, or get out (or never get in) at the first sign of trouble?

Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay in it. This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATE…

Imagine how many drunk/careless passengers might press it. Stopping in the middle of the street or highway could be a serious safety hazard.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#242

Post by ChicagoDave »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #149
verelo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah its absurd. As a Tesla driver, I have to say the autopilot model really does feel like what someone who's never driven a car before thinks it's like. Using vision only is so ignorant of what driving is all about: sound, vibration, vision, heat, cold...these are all clues on road condition. If the car isn't feeling all these things as part of the model, you're handicapping it. In a brilliant way Lidar is the miss…

The inputs to FSD are: 7 cameras x 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s 48kHz audio Nav maps and route for next few miles 100Hz kinematics (speed, IMU, odometry, etc) Source: https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571

Fog, heavy rain, heavy snow, people running between cars or from an obstructed view…

None of these technologies can ever be 100%, so we’re basically accepting a level of needless death.

Musk has even shrugged off FSD related deaths as, “progress”.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#243

Post by buddhistdude »

crazygringo wrote: post #231
hazrmard wrote: post #113

cue the bell curve meme for learning autonomy: ____.----.____ ______/ \______ _____/ \_____ ________________________________________ (simulations) (real world data) (simulations) Seems like it, no? We started with physics-based simulators for training policies. Then put them in the real world using modular perception/prediction/planning systems. Once enough data was collected, we went back to making simulators. This…

That's a very interesting way of looking at it. Yes, you start with simulating something simpler than the real world. Then you use the real world. Then you need to go back to simulations for real-world things that are too rare in the real world to train with. Seems like there ought to be a name for this, like so-and-so's law.

hazrmard's law

Re: The Waymo World Model

#244

Post by ok_dad »

I'd like to see Waymo have a few of their Drivers do some sim racing training and then compete in some live events. It wouldn't matter much to me if they were fast at all, I'd like to see them go into the rookie classes in various games and see how they avoid crashes from inexperienced players. I believe that it would be the ultimate "shitty drivers vs. AI" test.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#245

Post by cyanydeez »

robotresearcher wrote: post #217
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.

Human depth perception uses stereo out to only about 2 or 3 meters, after which the distance between your eyes is not a useful baseline. Beyond 3m we use context clues and depth from motion when available.

ok, but a care is a few meters wide, isn't that enough for driving depth perception similar to humans

Re: The Waymo World Model

#246

Post by smallmancontrov »

senordevnyc wrote: post #225
kypro wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of viewing FSD as an engineering problem that needs solving I tend to think Elon is on to something with the camera-only approach – although I would agree the current hardware has problems with weather, etc. The issue with lidar is that many of the difficult edge-cases of FSD are all visible-light vision problems. Lidar might be able to tell you there's a car up front, but it can't tell you that…

This is so wild to read when Waymo is currently doing like 500,000 paid rides every week , all over the country, with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile Tesla seems to have a handful of robotaxis in Austin, and it's unclear if any of them are actually driverless. But the Tesla engineers are "in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data"? What?

Tesla has driven 7.5B autonomous miles to Waymo's 0.2B, but yes, Waymo looks like they are ahead when you stratify the statistics according to the ass-in-driver-seat variable and neglect the stratum that makes Tesla look good.

The real question is whether doing so is smart or dumb. Is Tesla hiding big show-stopper problems that will prevent them from scaling without a safety driver? Or are the big safety problems solved and they are just finishing the Robotaxi assembly line that will crank out more vertically-integrated purpose-designed cars than Waymo's entire fleet every day before lunch?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#247

Post by jeffbee »

coffeemug wrote: post #189
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…

The vertical integration argument should apply to Grok. They have Tesla driving data (probably much more data than Waymo), Twitter data, plus Tesla/SpaceX manufacturing data. When/if Optimus starts on the production line, they'll have that data too. You could argue they haven't figured out how to take advantage of it, but the potential is definitely there.

"Tesla has more data than Waymo" is some of the lamest cope ever. Tesla does not have more video than Google! That's crazy! People who repeat this are crazy! If there was a massive flow of video from Tesla cars to Tesla HQ that would have observable side effects.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#248

Post by [deleted] »

nightpool wrote: post #221

Interesting, but it feels like it's going to cope very poorly with actually safety-critical situations. Having a world model that's trained on successful driving data feels like it's going to "launder" a lot of implicit assumptions that would cause a car to get into a crash in real life (e.g. there's probably no examples in the training data where the car is behind a stopped car, and the driver pulls over to another…

[deleted]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#249

Post by Jblx2 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #216
spaceywilly wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though. But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicl…

> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just a…

Is that:

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

or

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 10% of roads...

...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it happen all at once for a country. Especially a large country like the U.S.. More like, some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only, and then some other cities also do years later. And then maybe it expands to something larger than just the core after 5 or 10 years. And so on...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#250

Post by robotresearcher »

cyanydeez wrote: post #245
robotresearcher wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human depth perception uses stereo out to only about 2 or 3 meters, after which the distance between your eyes is not a useful baseline. Beyond 3m we use context clues and depth from motion when available.

ok, but a care is a few meters wide, isn't that enough for driving depth perception similar to humans

The depths you are trying to estimate are to the other cars, people, turnings, obstacles, etc. Could be 100m away or more on the highway.
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