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Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

arstechnica.com

381–390 of 581 posts

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#381
post #259

FSD is all about collecting insane amount of data about edge cases that happen in the real world. Tesla has built the infrastructure for this, and will win the FSD race by a wide margin.

Is snow an edge case? My cameras don't function when it's snowing or there's snow in the ground. Or there's snow banks around the road. My dash is lit with the "some cameras are blocked" 24/7 for the whole winter time. And proximity readings are blinking those yellow / red lights all the time from the right side as it thinks the snow bank next to the road is too close. Or the system thinks the camera is blocked becau…

It doesn't work perfectly yet, but they're on their way making it work. Give it some time.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's interesting how optimistic long term visions conflict - if you really think autonomous cabs will become widespread then by implication you are also saying that car sales will be drastically lower. Tough to be serious betting on both. The math of "you'll pay more for the car but the car will go out and make money for you as a robotic Uber" sounds like a pyramid scheme to me; if too many people do it, it can no lo…

Frankly, it always sounded like a solution looking for a problem for me. Transportation is like electricity, it’s all about peak demand. I’m writing this at midnight on a Sunday... there’s no demand for transportation. Come 7-930AM, demand is 1000x more. There’s no self driving taxi that makes sense as car replacement. We already have busses, which are already really cheap and can get cheaper if cars are too expensiv…

Current peak demand in cars is limited by roads, and ... always will be. (Hence Musk trying to dig tunnels for more roads.)

Which might be okay if throughput is kept high, and folks can read/eat/sleep while ij traffic.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#383
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. There is another group who find Lidar unnecessary for driving: humans.

Sure. But that’s a moot point if it turns out you need to basically replicate large parts of the human brain in order to drive with cameras alone.

But those are needed for L5 anyway, Lidar or noLidar. The big issue is the world model, what's the prior when uncertainty rises, how to spot really out of ordinary stuff, and how to spot really ordinary-looking but dangerous stuff.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I don't want to defend Tesla, but I do want to push back on this a bit! Facebook made "move fast and break things" famous, which was Zuckerberg's way of presenting a tradeoff. Everyone company says they want to move fast, but Zuckerberg made it clear that the company should care more about velocity than stability. I don't believe that's Tesla's attitude. Rather, I think their attitude is more "move fast and ignor…

Regulations are all we have to keep things from breaking...ignoring them about something like a self driving car should be a criminal offense.

There is nothing like self driving in current regulations, much less 10-15 years ago when people seriously started working on it. So, in your views, even starting working on this stuff should be criminal offense?

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#385
post #26

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodo…

I have one question for Tesla customers who trust the company to deliver full FSD. How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance? The NHTSA opened an investigation into premature HUD failures because they prevented the backup cameras from working. But the fact of the matter is, the company used a small partition of in…

> How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance?

Easy: compartmentalization of knowledge. Most software developers I have met have no idea about the storage stuff under their application, they trust the OS and the hardware people to deal with it. I mean, who can blame them in the age of AWS or actual servers where companies simply throw money at any problem and hardware is rotated for something new before write endurance ever becomes an issue And the hardware people probably knew that the OS people would run Linux, but didn't expect logfile spam.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#386
post #26

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodo…

WOW 1 paragraph of data > 48 page pdf of "look at me i did this first so i know what im doing" . Honestly this is quite dumb , waymo will NEVER i REPEAT NEVER make it to market let alone with any amount of volume ... And it has nothing to autonomy or tech ... just by virtue of having bulky expensive sensor's (which need to be serviced regularly) and power draw of the compute and tech .... other than having a very niche proof of concept like project loon i think waymo will also fold like all of its fellow google x brother-in.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#387
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you reconcile that belief with the fact that Tesla's embedded developers did not understand the extremely simple concept of write endurance? That sounds more like the kind of situation where the software department said "we need to have a system that has X amount of storage" and the hardware department made the hardware for it, but there was some missing communication about endurance. It's likely not the sam…

Well it still speaks volumes about internal culture. Everyone on the team should know they are developing a safety-critical system/component. Yet, the Bob from software can write a sloppy spec and Alice from hardware can not care about the spec being sloppy. It is entirely baffling.

>Yet, the Bob from software can write a sloppy spec and Alice from hardware can not care about the spec being sloppy.

Ehhh, you have not been long in industry, have you? :)

And that's why you get everything in writing and doubly signed off from all parties involved. Even telling people directly, to their face, with witnesses, does not work. Checklists for the departments does however.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#388

Self driving is an unsolved problem, so I don't see how Waymo's CEO is qualified to say whether or not Tesla's plan is "how it works."

From other technologies such as speech recognition, "how it works" seems to be - collect a lot of data and develop and train better and better models.

So tesla is collecting data, lots of it.

Additionally, there's the capitalism side of things - make sure you have a revenue stream to continue "develop and train"

So tesla has a revenue stream matched with the data collection.

So... Tesla is head and shoulders above Waymo in this.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it's legal. How can it be allowed to send out uncertified software to cars on public roads? Aren't there safety standards that need to be met? I thought that safety critical products where better regulated than this.

In Europe, most of the Tesla features are disabled because they were deemed hazardous. Only lane assist and adaptive cruise control is enabled. The others are severely limited or disabled (Summon etc.)

While I'm not a big Tesla fan, I don't think legislation is any indication of the actual safety that can be provided. Europe legislation tightly follows what German carmakers can deliver. Once they can offer the same features, it will be legal in no time.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#390
post #380
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a hard reach and a bunch of word mincing. To this day in 2021, many people still don't wear seat belts. Even though that's a solved problem. Some people will do stupid things. It's human nature.

Sure but car makers don't imply or give impression that you don't need seatbelts thanks to the collusion detection system or the airbags. They don't sell seatbelt-free system that only in the small print says that the seatbelt must be worn all the times except for off-road driving.

You're being a bit pedantic here. Every time you engage autopilot, it literally tells you (in bold letters) to "Always Keep Your Hands on the Wheel" and to "Be Prepared to Take Over at Any Time". Keep abusing it and it will actually disable it for the rest of the drive. Did you know that?

There's no "impression" being given. Like I mentioned. There will always be a small fraction of irresponsible humans that will do dumb things. No amount of engineering can fix that.

Case in point is this video: https://youtu.be/VS5zQKXHdpM?t=88 Her mom is even helping this kid film this stupid act just for clout and views.

Tesla owners grilled him and said what he's doing is dangerous and irresponsible. He then deleted them all and turned off commenting. But people like to demonize Tesla owners. Which I find bizarre.

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