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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#321

Post by ciberado »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #139
jellojello wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.

That one was motivated by the need of controlling the app distribution channel, just like they keep the web as a second class citizen in their ecosystem nowadays.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#322

Post by kypro »

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?

I wasn't arguing Tesla is ahead of Waymo? Nor do I think they are. All I was arguing was that it makes sense from the perspective of a consumer automobile maker to not use lidar.

I don't think Tesla is that far behind Waymo though given Waymo has had a significant head start, the fact Waymo has always been a taxi-first product, and given they're using significantly more expensive tech than Tesla is.

Additionally, it's not like this is a lidar vs cameras debate. Waymo also uses and needs cameras for FSD for the reasons I mentioned, but they supplement their robotaxis with lidar for accuracy and redundancy.

My guess is that Tesla will experiment with lidar on their robotaxis this year because design decisions should differ from those of a consumer automobile. But I could be wrong because if Tesla wants FSD to work well on visually appealing and affordable consumer vehicles then they'll probably have to solve some of the additional challenges with with a camera-only FSD system. I think it will depend on how much Elon decides Tesla needs to pivot into robotaxis.

Either way, what is undebatable is that you can't drive with lidar only. If the weather is so bad that cameras are useless then Waymos are also useless.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#323

Post by Dig1t »

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…

>or grok's porn

I know it’s gross, but I would not discount this. Remember why Blu-ray won over HDDVD? I know it won for many other technical reasons, but I think there are a few historical examples of sexual content being a big competitive advantage.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#325

Post by hungryhobbit »

hosh wrote: post #302
brokencode wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a point in time when basically every well known AI researcher worked at Google. They have been at the forefront of AI research and investing heavily for longer than anybody. It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research. But they are in full gear now that there is real competition, and it’ll be cool to see what they release over th…

I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a difference in this.

Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge.

Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had by far the most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A single intern could have kept the whole thing running, and Google has literal billions, but they couldn't see the value in it.

I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good portion of America is reading every day could have any value for an AI company, right?

Google has always been terrible about turning tech into (viable, maintained) products.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#326

Post by doctoboggan »

scoofy wrote: post #312
caycep wrote: post #265

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

As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment…

> they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations

Why do you expect them to make money? Roads don't make money and no one thinks to complain about that. One of the purposes of government is to make investment in things that have more nebulous returns. Moving more people to public transit makes better cities, healthier and happier citizens, stronger communities, and lets us save money on road infrastructure.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#327

Post by hibikir »

raphlinus wrote: post #272
AlfredBarnes wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always felt to me that the LLM chatbots were a surprise to Google, not LLMs, or machine learning in general.

Not true at all. I interacted with Meena[1] while I was there, and the publication was almost three years before the release of ChatGPT. It was an unsettling experience, felt very science fiction. [1]: https://research.google/blog/towards-a-conversational-agent-...

The surprise was not that they existed: There were chatbots in Google way before ChatGPT. What surprised them was the demand, despite all the problems the chatbots have. The pig problem with LLMs was not that they could do nothing, but how to turn them into products that made good money. Even people in openAI were surprised about what happened.

In many ways, turning tech into products that are useful, good, and don't make life hell is a more interesting issue of our times than the core research itself. We probably want to avoid the valuing capturing platform problem, as otherwise we'll end up seeing governments using ham fisted tools to punish winners in ways that aren't helpful either

Re: The Waymo World Model

#328

Post by kypro »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #293
smallmancontrov wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's more Tesla's on the road than Waymo's by several orders of magnitude. Additionally the types of roads and conditions Tesla's drive under is completely incomparable to Waymo.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#329

Post by semiquaver »

xnx wrote: post #295
kidk wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Yep. https://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php/Farebox_Re... is a sobering reminder that many cities’ public transportation would cost $20-50 per trip if paid entirely by riders and thus could not exist without subsidy.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#330

Post by jrm4 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #187
jrm4 wrote: 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.

Filipino driver is false. Filipino guidance person is true.

The difference being?
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