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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#381

Post by zild3d »

wg0 wrote: post #81

At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't. Isn't it or something has changed lately?

> the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't

Partnering with Uber let's them offer self driving only within pretty well known constraints. Weather, locality, traffic, routes, time, etc.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#382

Post by londons_explore »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #376
londons_explore wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly. Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor. And th…

As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is…

> We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is.

I hope they have tested this by remote-controlling cars using only the camera inputs.

ie. verify a human can safely drive the car using only what the computer sees.

If a human can't safely drive in those conditions, a computer probably can't either.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#383

Post by mensetmanusman »

threeseed wrote: post #358
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

> They’ll get there eventually Debatable. So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#384

Post by laratied »

mnd999 wrote: post #326
lhorie wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to co…

> The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow. Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than try…

I wouldn't even get in a self driving taxi if it was free because of how cheap human drivers are. For me, to use a self driving taxi it would have to be so safe that we would be moving towards banning human driving anyway.

Otherwise, it is about as bad of a risk to reward bet as I can think of compared to human drivers.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#385

Post by deepzn »

zamnos wrote: post #367
deepzn wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we're talking about overall effectiveness, then I think it is. Maybe passing a minimum threshold and having a safety effective of say 95% vs 99% or something. It's obviously going to be a very high percentage threshold that needs to be crossed to allow the public to use it. So, right now it's like a trial experiment with FSD, but I definitely feel like a data advantage would play out into a higher safety rating be…

just to nitpick, but with airline travel about five or six nines (99.9999%) safe, that is, one fatality every million miles of travel or so, 95% vs 99% is nowhere near good enough. https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/how-safe-were-commerci...

Yes it will be likely needing a 99.99%+ accuracy. I just made a vague suggestion, as I didn't have time to look it up. Elon mentioned it too, it doesn't just need to better than a human, but massively better. I don't know the exact accident stats for human drivers. But self-driving cars will need to be much higher.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#386

Post by KETpXDDzR »

I'm delighted to read these news. Uber finally found someone to partner with/get bought by. They offered their complete self-driving department for sale more than two years ago (I was part of a group to assess the deal with a possible buyer). I think Waymo also realized that Uber's self-driving devision is no competition to the big players. So I guess Waymo is mainly interested in their user base.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#388

Post by TaylorAlexander »

londons_explore wrote: post #382
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is…

> We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. I hope they have tested this by remote-controlling cars using only the camera inputs. ie. verify a human can safely drive the car using only what the computer sees. If a human can't safely drive in those conditions, a computer probably can't either.

Very interesting question. Certainly I’ve never heard them discuss this in any of the AI system lectures. It’s always stated as “we know humans can drive using only our eyes so we have an existence proof”.

Plus, a human could drive in a variety of conditions but there’s just so many possible scenarios the car could encounter, and humans crash too, so the real question is what is the relative performance between a human and the machine across thousands of potential or actual crashes. Kinda hard to measure.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#389

Post by TaylorAlexander »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #383
threeseed wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’ll get there eventually Debatable. So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Well they currently devote a lot of compute power to building a 3D occupancy map of the world from cameras so it’s possible that fusion with LiDAR could be done with less compute. Also their computers keep getting more powerful. But generally you’re correct, we don’t know how it would go.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#390

Post by threeseed »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #383
threeseed wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’ll get there eventually Debatable. So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Everyone except Tesla uses LiDAR.

So any compute issues are not preventing adoption.

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