Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#321

Post by slg » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #301

trixie_ wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the presentation they mention that Lidar is good at developing tech demos quickly, but they've found it is insufficient in reality. Which of those 10 companies you reference have moved far beyond tech demos?

Waymo operates the first autonomous taxi service in Phoenix with plans to expand geographically, no info about the others.

Phoenix basically provides perfect conditions for self driving cars. There is very little precipitation. It gets more daylight and sunlight than any other major city in the US. There is little to no vehicle endangering wildlife. The city was mostly designed post-cars meaning there are lots of big newish straight roads and there isn't much pedestrian culture. To put it simply there is a lot of "reality" that exists in other markets that isn't very present in Phoenix.

I'm not saying Waymo can't handle it, but there is a pretty big difference between being able to handle Phoenix and its suburbs compared to Boston and its suburbs for example.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#322

Post by mlindner » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #157

kitsunesoba wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally speaking I would not want to share a road with an autonomous car that had been tinkered on by some random Joe. Autonomous farm vehicles or something, sure, but public roads are way too risky. This is not the desktop environment of your Linux laptop, it’s monstrously complex software controlling thousands of pounds of metal and batteries.

See, I don't agree at all. Just like all cars have to pass a pretty strict annual inspection to be on the road, I imagine autonomous cars will have to go through regular assessment too. More specifically, I'm bothered by the fact that if you get into a crash in a Tesla, Tesla can disable your car and stop it from activating unless you do repairs at their approved dealership. You can't just buy parts from a scrapyard…

We don't have open source implantable medical devices either.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#323

Post by RivieraKid » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #309

RivieraKid wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so frustrating to see that people eat Elon's BS. Even after: - the Unsworth lie - the "zero concern and I mean zero about 10k Model 3s per week in Dec 2018" lie - the "funding secured" and "only uncertainty is shareholder approval" lies - the "short burn of the century" lies I mean, they were even wrong about Nvidia's chip today, Nvidia had to issue a statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesl…

There was no "Unsworth lie". There was Elon saying some very unkind things after Unsworth personally attacked him. Neither thing is appropriate, but let's not pretend this wasn't a tit-for-tat.

He purposefully framed it as a seriously meant allegation, not as an insult. And then even doubled down on it.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#324

Post by natch » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:43 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #301

trixie_ wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the presentation they mention that Lidar is good at developing tech demos quickly, but they've found it is insufficient in reality. Which of those 10 companies you reference have moved far beyond tech demos?

Waymo operates the first autonomous taxi service in Phoenix with plans to expand geographically, no info about the others.

Limited routes, geofenced, not truly autonomous, mows down pedestrians even with a supervisory driver.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#325

Post by justapassenger » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #287

dwighttk wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oh come on! If even half of what he says comes true in the next five years the world will not be the same. I could say 20 things that if even 1 comes true in the next five years the world will not be the same!

You could, but you're not a billionaire running multiple companies that have already done a ton of things that many, many experts said could not be done. Also note, I'm not saying Elon will do all or even half of them. I'm saying it's going to be damn exciting to watch, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he does, because I'd like the world to get better, and I'm happy to be an optimist.

> You could, but you're not a billionaire running multiple companies that have already done a ton of things that many, many experts said could not be done.

Like what? I often hear people saying that experts were saying it's impossible to land a rocket or make a good EV car. But I didn't hear experts saying that.

What I did hear, is experts saying it's impossible to make it in cost effective way. And for that - economy for spacex is still to be proven. Tesla is still bleeding money (apart from occasional financially engineered quarters).

That being said - while I think most of his companies are doomed to fail (due to gross mismanagement), I'm happy Elon is around. He's lying a lot, and always overestimating by an order of magnitude what he can deliver. But he does inspire people to go into science and engineering - spacex landing rockets are saturn 5 or space shuttle of this generation.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#326

Post by salty_biscuits » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

krzkaczor wrote: post #266

RivieraKid wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true, why do Waymo (or any of the top 10 self-driving companies besides Tesla) use Lidar? Two facts: 1. Tesla can't use Lidar because of cost and aesthetics. 2. Elon has a strong incentive to oversell their approach to self-driving.

As far as I understood HD maps are static data obtained by many various ways (not only lidar)[1]. AFAIR they claimed that Lidar itself provides some value (teaching neural networks how to measure the distance to various objects etc) but the gist is that image recognition is an absolute must-have for self-driving cars (which seems right to me). 1 - https://medium.com/@LyftLevel5/https-medium-com-lyftlevel5-r...

Apart from the map data going stale as it gets out of date, you always have the problem of registration of the vehicles position within the map. GNSS data can have a really long tailed error distribution (particularly within urban canyons and in tunnels). So you always need some way of making a local map and placing it within the high detail global map. There is a pragmatic argument saying if you already have a detailed local map, do you really need the global map apart from high level navigation tasks.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#327

Post by justapassenger » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #309

RivieraKid wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so frustrating to see that people eat Elon's BS. Even after: - the Unsworth lie - the "zero concern and I mean zero about 10k Model 3s per week in Dec 2018" lie - the "funding secured" and "only uncertainty is shareholder approval" lies - the "short burn of the century" lies I mean, they were even wrong about Nvidia's chip today, Nvidia had to issue a statement: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesl…

There was no "Unsworth lie". There was Elon saying some very unkind things after Unsworth personally attacked him. Neither thing is appropriate, but let's not pretend this wasn't a tit-for-tat.

There's huuuge difference between telling someone to stick something up their butt VS repeating, multiple times, to millions of people, that someone is a pedophile and you have proof of that.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#328

Post by gamblor956 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #268

gamblor956 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... It's also pretty clear based on the selective presentation of data that they're even further behind Waymo than everyone thought. This was the time to actually prove that their ahead, and all they could give was more of Elon's hot air. At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet! Must have missed that part, but if he actually…

> None of what Elon said will change the world in the next 5 years... Oh come on! If even half of what he says comes true in the next five years the world will not be the same. Entire car rated to 1 million miles (including the battery pack) with minimal servicing Level five autonomy at the end of 2020. Remove steering wheels and pedals from cars a year after that. After robo-fleet goes live Tesla will be "massively…

He mentioned that all their cars since 2016 have had redundant power steering, redundant wiring and even redundant power. Even if it loses the main power pack it can still steer and brake safely.

Given that so many Tesla owners have complained about the power steering and wiring going back (and the delays in getting these issues fixed) the most likely explanation is that Tesla is attempting to forestall maintenance issues by simply adding built-in backups rather than by improving quality control and making the primaries work better.

IOW: having built-in redundant parts for some of the most important parts of the car--which aren't known for breaking down in cars from other manufacturers--is actually a sign of failure on Tesla's part, not a sign of forward-thinking.

Entire car rated to 1 million miles (including the battery pack) with minimal servicing

That's nice. Tesla can't manage to get car panels aligned properly, and a number of cars are still awaiting parts a year or more after they went in for service, and Tesla hasn't managed to fix its own billion-dollar factory line to work properly...but in 5 years they're promising better-made cars than any other car maker? Toyoto has earned the right to make that claim with their decades of consistency. Tesla hasn't, especially not after the Model 3 fiascos.

Level five autonomy at the end of 2020. Remove steering wheels and pedals from cars a year after that.

Call me when they manage to actually stop their cars from veering toward freeway dividers. It was still happening as of November 2018... Also, there's the pesky little problem of Tesla not yet having demonstrated a door-to-door trip yet in uncontrolled conditions despite promising that back in 2016.

After robo-fleet goes live Tesla will be "massively profitable"

See above. Need to hit Level 5 before then. But based on all the lots filled with unpurchased Model 3s, they'll probably have the fleet for it if they ever achieve Level 5...

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#329

Post by Joky » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #318

dreaminvm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cherry-pick rare cases and use their fleet to get more examples of these situations. This seems like the right approach given more miles following the same car in a straight line is pretty useless. My takeaway from the presentation is that Tesla will perform better than other companies in this space (although I don't know enough about Waymo to comment) due to the following: -You want a large dataset (Tesla and m…

My point was that it appears that Tesla doesn't have a large and varied dataset. It has a small and pre-selected data set, since the cars only transmit data when pre-determined triggers are fired. Thus, it doesn't matter how many 1000s of drivers Tesla "has" or how many "situations" they're in, since it's not actually collecting data from most of these situations. And Autpilot's performance (including its numerous re…

> My point was that it appears that Tesla doesn't have a large and varied dataset. It has a small and pre-selected data set,

I don't thinks it is a fair characterization: first the notion of "large" is fairly subjective. But more importantly the fact that they collect data on pre-determined triggers is just a guarantee that the dataset is not over-fitted (let say to the 280 and 101 in the Bay Area and to Elon's commute in LA) and instead has good coverage of the world.

Their capabilities of triggering on situation allows them to grow the dataset quickly in a supervised way. It is all about the granularity of these triggers, imagine that you can express "collect situation in tunnels with jerk higher than X m/s3" or "collect all lane change abort in snow condition", ... In the next 24h you get data from all over the world and this data is automatically tagged and classified by the neural net.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#330

Post by Fuzzwah » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 11:50 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #125

I'm sorry but I'm finding it really difficult to watch this and match up what the engineer is saying to what Elon Musk is saying. For example, the engineer says the custom ASIC does 144 TOps for 2 chips vs the NVidia drive Xavier - does 21 TOps. Okay, well yeah I expect your custom ASIC does have a nice performance advantage over the equivalent GPU. at 3.5x advantage probably seems reasonable. Cue Elon Musk: "At firs…

>> how could it be that Tesla

> Mate, it's a dot product with some memory attached, and not a single detail your half hour deep dive has gone into suggests anything other than a bog standard ASIC.

There you go, you answered the question Musk put forward. Grats.