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The Waymo World Model

waymo.com

291–300 of 699 posts

Re: The Waymo World Model

#291
post #279
post #265

All this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains

Isn't a vehicle that goes from anywhere to anywhere on your own schedule, safely, privately, cleanly, and without billions in subsidies better?

Billions of subsidies? Im confused you talking about cars or trains.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#292
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime It basically happened for horses.

Horses don't vote.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

Tesla's also been involved in WAY more accidents than Waymo - and has tried to silence those people, claim FSD wasn't active, etc.

What good is a huge fleet of Robotaxis if no one will trust them? I won't ever set foot in a Robotaxi, as long as Elon is involved.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer struggled to perceive the 3D world around it. Also, integration effort went down but it never disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed…

depth estimation is but one part of the problem— atmospheric and other conditions which blind optical visible spectrum sensors, lack of ambient (sunlight) and more. lidar simply outperforms (performs at all?) in these conditions. and provides hardware back distance maps, not software calculated estimation

Lidar fails worse than cameras in nearly all those conditions. There are plenty of videos of Tesla's vision-only approach seeing obstacles far before a human possibly could in all those conditions on real customer cars. Many are on the old hardware with far worse cameras

Re: The Waymo World Model

#295
post #291
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a vehicle that goes from anywhere to anywhere on your own schedule, safely, privately, cleanly, and without billions in subsidies better?

Billions of subsidies? Im confused you talking about cars or trains.

No major US public transportation system is fully paid for by riders.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#296
post #163

1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure. 2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.

(2) I really don't understand why people are surprised that Waymo has fallbacks? The fact that they had a team ready to take over as necessary was well known. I've seen a bunch of comments about this and it seems like people are confused.

I think they're surprised to learn it's being done by a bunch of people on the other side of the world because they don't want to pay American wages.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if they’re already “fusioning” all these things, why would LIDAR be any different?

Tesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer struggled to perceive the 3D world around it. Also, integration effort went down but it never disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed…

> but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021

It's still rather weak and true monocular depth estimation really wasn't spectacularly anything in 2021. It's fundamentally ill posed and any priors you use to get around that will come to bite you in the long tail of things some driver will encounter on the road.

The way it got good is by using camera overlap in space and over time while in motion to figure out metric depth over the entire image. Which is, humorously enough, sensor fusion.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#299
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Lidar anymore on the 2026 Volvo models ES60 and EX60. See for example: https://www.jalopnik.com/2032555/volvo-ends-luminar-lidar-20...

I love Volvo, am considering buying one in a couple weeks actually, but they're doing nothing interesting in terms of ADAS, as far as I can tell. It seems like they're limited to adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, both of which have been solved problems for more than a decade. It sounds like they removed Lidar due to supplier issues and availability, not because they're trying to build self-driving cars and ha…

Is lane keeping really a solved problem? Just last year one of my brand new rented cars tried to kill me a few times when I tried it again, and so far not even the simple lane leaving detection mechanism worked properly in any of the tried cars when it was raining.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#300
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer struggled to perceive the 3D world around it. Also, integration effort went down but it never disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed…

Monocular depth estimation can be fooled by adversarial images, or just scenes outside of its distribution. It's a validation nightmare and a joke for high reliability.

It isn't monocular though. A Tesla has 2 front-facing cameras, narrow and wide-angle. Beyond that, it is only neural nets at this point, so depth estimation isn't directly used; it is likely part of the neural net, but only the useful distilled elements.
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