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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#431

Why is this considered a big stride when Waymo is doing it for 6 months already? https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/welcoming-our-first-riders-in...

6 months is not really a long time in the timeline of self driving cars which have been in development since the 70s.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but all of those quotes are by Elon Musk…

True. I actually replied to the entirely wrong comment, should have been one up... I have a great deal more confidence in truly revolutionary things that have been factually delivered by SpaceX (such as 100+ re-uses of a rocket first stage now), and I question how much of that is really due to Musk at all. Maybe Musk as a figurehead. I wonder if all of the Elon fanboys know that much of what's been accomplished at Sp…

I'll bite. Say I'm a Musk fanboy... I can assure you that all Elon fanboys I know are fully aware who Gwynne Shotwell is. Now, your turn: please explain how the following SpaceX accomplishments are thanks to Gwynne Shotwell (other that the hand-wavy "well if she didn't get the contracts none of this would be possible"):

- Merlin engine

- Vertical landing

- Raptor engine

... or, what exactly is the "much of what's been accomplished" that you talk about? Look, I'm not trying to minimize her role, she was clearly a great COO for SpaceX, but it seems weird to me that you try to minimize Musk's importance while at the same time picking one other singular person to highlight. I could understand the argument that "it's a team effort, no one person did this alone"; but if we're picking only one person to assign credits, then surely, _surely_ Musk is that one person, right? I understand the skepticism that he really does engineering & design, so here is supporting evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#433
post #93
post #8

Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…

Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…

Does your car stop at stop signs ?

Because at least one of y'all have to for this to work.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but all of those quotes are by Elon Musk…

True. I actually replied to the entirely wrong comment, should have been one up... I have a great deal more confidence in truly revolutionary things that have been factually delivered by SpaceX (such as 100+ re-uses of a rocket first stage now), and I question how much of that is really due to Musk at all. Maybe Musk as a figurehead. I wonder if all of the Elon fanboys know that much of what's been accomplished at Sp…

Does it really matter? If there's no Elon, there's no SpaceX. And I say this as someone that doesn't buy into the founder cult.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#435
post #398
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary. My contention is that there’s no way to actually solve for the general case with currently existing tec…

Novelty isn’t nearly as big of a problem as you might think. One of Wamo’s famous videos was someone on an electric scooter chasing a duck in the middle of the street. That’s very odd behavior, but the car followed the rather simple option of just not hitting them and going forward when possible. Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A t…

> Cars really don’t need to identify what something is just it’s location and movement which is a vastly easier problem. A trash can rolling down the street can be treated just like an oil drum doing the same thing etc.

You’d think that, until you encounter something like a turn restriction sign with a bizarre conditional restriction that it’s never seen before. At which point the car needs to OCR the text, parse the semantic meaning, and apply to the scene.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#436
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don’t regress per-pixel depth or use convolutions and region proposals to draw bounding boxes around objects. They don’t function on models with fixed weights trained by backprop either. The idea that “vision only” somehow more closely resembles how humans drive quickly falls apart if you inspect the internals of these systems.

I think the comparison comes from the fact that humans infer a 3D map from stereo vision whereas LiDAR to some extent gives you the ground truth 3D map. You’re right that it falls apart pretty quickly though.

Except Tesla isn’t inferring a 3D map from stereo vision either, at least not outside of the front facing cameras - they’re using monocular depth prediction.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#437
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even cheaper: don't have computer driven transit, but human driven transit. The current money sunk on the automated driving tech startups could pay drivers for years to come. What I would like to see is companies and people working towrds eliminating as many vehciles from the road. It is untainable, if we want an habitable planet, to have have a dependency on cars. This means we have to move back to a denser environm…

> Even cheaper: don't have computer driven transit, but human driven transit Cheaper on what time frame? Obviously the upfront R&D costs start out as more expensive, but the marginal cost goes toward 0 while human cost is flat/increases. Also cheaper isn't the only axis, safety is a big reason to invest in not having humans drive.

Paying humans have better utility, for society in whole, than cheap machines.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#438
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don’t regress per-pixel depth or use convolutions and region proposals to draw bounding boxes around objects. They don’t function on models with fixed weights trained by backprop either. The idea that “vision only” somehow more closely resembles how humans drive quickly falls apart if you inspect the internals of these systems.

The similarity is in the problem to be solved, not the details of the compute pipeline. Depth must be inferred somehow, rather than measured by actively interacting with the surface, as it is in LiDAR.

If you really wanted to make this argument, you wouldn’t even want to bother inferring depth, since that’s not what humans do, not directly at least. If you’re actually trying to obtain a depth map as part of your pipeline, LIDAR (or LiDAR + vision feeding into a denser depth prediction model) would always be a better strategy, cost aside, since determining depth from images is an ill posed problem.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#439
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your view on whether self-driving cars should automatically be 100% liable for any accidents? I ask this in the context of machines being governed by classical deterministic physics, so there is an argument that there is no such thing as an accident involving a self-driving car: only a design flaw. This is a genuine question, as I can see that companies with self-driving systems that work, and who do serious f…

I've given it some thought, and I think the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes. Who else is there? The passengers certainly can't be responsible for any programming or manufacturing errors. There are corner cases and exceptions, but that has to be the rule. Which should mean that as and SDC owner, you don't have to pay car insurance.

>the SDC manufacturer must be liable for any accidents the SDC causes.

There's the rub... How do you seperate those from the rest?

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#440
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise CEO here. Our strategy has been to solve the challenges needed to operate driverless robotaxis on a well-equipped vehicle, then aggressively drive the cost down. Many OEMs are doing this in reverse order. They're trying to squeeze orders of magnitude of performance gains out of really low-cost hardware. Today it's unclear what strategy will win. In a few years our next generation of low-cost compute and sensin…

An extremely wise set of decisions. I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions; nor to accept that only passive sensing (cameras) can be used, when Active Sensing (probing, if you will) that Radar and LiDAR use is clearly giving the control computers more information about Reality (tm). By using all (or almost all) available Active and Passive sensing technologies, fused w…

> I also see no reason, a priori, to 'blind' a vehicle to certain spectra of EM emissions

The reason is simple: cost. The goal isn't to build a proof-of-concept safe AV, it's to build one that meets the safety bar _and_ is as cost-effective as possible, in a reasonable timeframe.

I happen to agree with the target-then-scale approach, but I also agree with Kyle that it's not a given that this is approach is definitely superior to the one that launches everywhere and tries to improve functionality.

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