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Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#281

Post by simonh »

dullgiulio wrote: post #220
Quarrelsome wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you shouldn’t have to harvest lots of data for intelligent AI. Er.... that's not how it works. As a Valve employee put it (a talk about ML recognising cheaters), machine learning is just an equation: y = f(x) where you can actually derive the FUNCTION f if you have enough x/y pairs. Without those pairs then most of the successful techniques in machine learning fail to function. Yes you can generate your own data bu…

Plus, I don't quite get what is the privacy being violated when taking a lot of pictures of red traffic lights...

Mine the exif data for the time and geolocation of the people taking the pictures and what camera/phone they used. You might even be able to tell which direction they were travelling in.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#282

Post by gugagore »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #237
paraschopra wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. You can code your prior knowledge into the model, and make do with way less x/y pairs. Data is a substitute for doing engineering by hand. If you do the latter, you require less data.

I don't see how it makes my statement untrue. The most effective ML techniques are more effective the more x/y pairs you have. Sure, you can get a leg up if you partially define F yourself but then you're no longer being as hands off as before. In practice the WHOLE of F() will likely be a blend of machine learning as well as heuristics as a product of various layers that are one or the other.

Not the poster you're replying to, but it's just that you said "that's not how it works", and then suggested that the only way to get F is through data, even if it means generating synthetic data.

So that's wrong and untrue, as you recognize in this latest comment by saying you can partially define F. To make a concrete example, the convolution operator, the number of layers, their connectivity--all of that partially defines F. Finding a structure is what allows you to learn from the x/y pairs instead of just storing them in a look-up table.

It makes sense, then, that finding a better structure may allow you to learn from fewer x/y pairs. This is Apple's purported approach.

It also means that if you have a huge number of x/y pairs, you might benefit from (or get away with) using a simpler structure. This is Google's approach in the domains where they have a lot of data.

It is true that an important lesson has been "when designers build structure into machine learning systems, they often build in the wrong things, and they end up making commitments that the data cannot undo". But there's still a lot of structure that we put into machine learning system, and we're still learning about what good structures are for different applications, and different regimes of data.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#283

Post by Shivetya »

simonh wrote: post #245
adrianN wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensors on humans don't work well in snow or rain either. That doesn't stop us from driving.

Humans can make risk/reward calculations that computers can't. Top take an extreme example, a given set of snow and ice conditions might be bad enough that any reasonable person would not want to drive in them. In such a situation, any well designed self-driving car would refuse to drive. BUT my wife is pregnant, it's a difficult pregnancy with a high risk of death for her and the infant, and she's suddenly gone into…

Oh computers can make the risk/reward calculations, their criteria for risk and reward is wholly in the hands of who develops the logic.

and there in lies the problems for companies developing these systems. with current law they would be liable for any negative outcome. logs would be required to be kept and every decision would surely be pulled apart by whatever paid experts each side can find.

so without legislation, legislation the consumer must be very wary about, comes about limiting liability to such systems they will have to side with caution and even then every event is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

finally, would you or anyone you know trust a system which states it can do something you find adversely risky to actually do with you or your loved ones at risk? what would that take? it might simply be a decision of local values

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#284

Post by gugagore »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #256
paraschopra wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. You can code your prior knowledge into the model, and make do with way less x/y pairs. Data is a substitute for doing engineering by hand. If you do the latter, you require less data.

Traffic is a chaos system, you can't engineer the edge cases. At best you have heuristics.

I don't think "traffic is chaotic" is the issue with driverless cars. We'd be satisfied with a car that solved everything except for global (i.e. non-local) traffic flow issues.

That said, a dynamical system may exhibit chaos for one setting of the parameters, and may not exhibit chaos for other settings of the parameters. It may be true that the equations governing traffic flow have the potential to exhibit chaos, and do exhibit chaos when 1. humans drive, or 2. the drivers have only local sensing. But that doesn't mean it would still be true for driverless cars.

But again, that's not the issue at play. We wouldn't fault an driverless car for getting stuck in traffic. It's more like it has to work when it's snowing, when you can't see the lane markers, when a kid in a trashbag costume jumps into the street, etc. Those are the edge cases that we care about right now.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#285

Post by selectodude »

scarface74 wrote: post #219
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be scared to buy an Apple car. Let there be a design flaw: It will take a class action suit for them to acknowledge it. Until then, anyone who drives to their Apple Car Store will be told to pay out of their own pocket for fixing it, that they obviously mishandled the car, Apple is not to blame, it is not covered under warranty.

As opposed to Google with their world class customer support or Uber with their great reputation for safety and ethics....

Or a GM car where they do the math to see if its worth it to issue a recall for cars that shut themselves off out of nowhere or Ford where they did a cost benefit analysis on a recall of Pinto fuel lines.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#286

Post by pwthornton »

chx wrote: post #93

Maybe Apple doesn't want to pursue a dream which, as far as we know, can only have a limited outcome? They don't really like such compromises in products. Check this: https://medium.com/s/story/self-driving-cars-will-always-be-... > Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” au…

I'd like to point out that what he says here about autonomous vehicles and the limits of their sensors applies to humans too. It is just socially acceptable to drive in averse conditions with limited visibility, and if you hit another car, person or something else, you just blame it on the weather. It's not socially acceptable for an autonomous vehicle to just wing it in bad conditions.

I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all.

Think about this: If you are in an advanced autonomous vehicle and you get a warning that conditions are so bad that the sensors can no longer see well enough to drive and that you should take over, should you really take over or should you stop driving?

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#287

Post by scarface74 »

selectodude wrote: post #285
scarface74 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to Google with their world class customer support or Uber with their great reputation for safety and ethics....

Or a GM car where they do the math to see if its worth it to issue a recall for cars that shut themselves off out of nowhere or Ford where they did a cost benefit analysis on a recall of Pinto fuel lines.

In other words, like every other business....

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#288

Post by throwka235 »

zbentley wrote: post #248
pkhamre wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Medium-article you posted: > In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. With that attitude, you are stuck in the past and don't want to make progress with technology.

> With that attitude, you are stuck in the past and don't want to make progress with technology. The statement you quoted is qualified, not an assertion of impossibility. Your claim is silly; the alternative to breathless hype isn't Luddism, it's getting educated about a field and proceeding, if possible, in an informed way. Claiming delusional enthusiasm (with a side of hucksterism and a strong odor of financial inc…

How many times have we heard from “experts in the field” say it can’t be done, and then new advances solve the problem?

When I hear an expert say, “...and that may never change,” I interpret it to mean, “I don’t know how to solve it.”

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#289

Post by toasterlovin »

krn wrote: post #244
toasterlovin wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it’s disputed. Still, of the safest cars mentioned at the end of the article, none are made by Volvo.

EuroNCAP tests are a way more advanced than those done in North America[1]: "Ford Mustang hits the wall with 2-star Euro NCAP score [...] Lack of modern safety technology and other flaws mark Ford's sports car down in the latest round of tests. That's the lowest score a brand new vehicle has achieved in quite some time. [...] In NHTSA tests the Mustang scored five starts in every metric." [1] https://www.evo.co.uk/fo…

Good info, thanks!

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#290

Post by notahacker »

martin_bech wrote: post #271
chx wrote: post #93

Maybe Apple doesn't want to pursue a dream which, as far as we know, can only have a limited outcome? They don't really like such compromises in products. Check this: https://medium.com/s/story/self-driving-cars-will-always-be-... > Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” au…

If I remember correctly, that statement, mirrors what was beeing said about human flight, right before the wright brothers?

It also mirrors what was said to people who expected us all to have sentient computers that never made an error and second homes orbiting Alpha Centauri by the beginning of this century.
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