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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#431

Post by joshuamorton »

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…

It's worth noting that, at least for bart, the reason that it is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported.

When ridership plummeted by >50% during the pandemic, fixed costs stayed the same, but income dropped. Last time I checked, if Bart ridership returned to 2019 levels, with no other changes, it would be profitable again.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#432

Post by mgaunard »

fragmede wrote: post #116
reluctant_dev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco isn't uniformly dense and narrow, but it does have both, and it's run remarkably well so far.

On that specific count, not really. There's a skate park north end of the Mission, and Stevenson St is a two way road that borders it, but it's narrow enough that you need to drive up on the curb to get two vehicles side by side on the street. Waymo's can't handle that on a regular basis. Being San Francisco and not London, you can just skip that road, but if you find yourself in a Waymo on that street and are unluck…

I live in London. Most residential streets are two-way but there is only space for one car, and driving on the curb is not really an option.

The trick to UK streets is that parking actually happens on the street itself, and when driving you must find a spot when people are not parking to make way for people coming the other way.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#433

Post by mullingitover »

smallnix wrote: post #334
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…

> It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research. I always thought they deliberately tried to contain the genie in the bottle as long as they could

Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.

I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#434

Post by Mawr »

SebastianSosa wrote: post #394

Very concerned with this direction of training “counterfactual events such as whether the Waymo Driver could have safely driven more confidently instead of yielding in a particular situation.” Seems dicey. This could lead in the direction to a less safe Waymo. Since the counterfactual will be generated, I suspect that that the generations will be biased towards survivor situations where most video footage in its trai…

Not entering a roundabout when it's clearly safe to do so is a mark against you at a driving exam. So would be always driving at 5mph. It's just not that simple.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#437

Post by xnx »

rootusrootus wrote: post #416
xnx wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime It basically happened for horses.

Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo management, etc), but still allowed.

I think that will be how human-driven cars are in 30(?) years. Rare, but allowed with restrictions.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#438

Post by Mawr »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #413
sixo wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it certainly helps,doesn't it? This system is going to encounter more edge cases than a single human ever would. Hopefully the lessons from known unknowns generqlise to unknowns. And once they've been seen once they took can become part of the corpus.

Right but does this just rely on some human "brainstorming" a bunch of edge cases? It just strikes me as neverending edge case wack-a-mole A human doesn't need to see tons of examples of tornados and elephants to know to stop the car Doesn't that indicate some fundamental difference between the model and a human driver?

Neither does the car — it won't drive into what LIDAR sees as a wall. But stopping is not good enough, it needs to be able to navigate the obstacle as well.

Also, even if the car behaved perfectly anyway, these scenarios are useful for testing — validating that the expected behavior happens.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#439

Post by atleastoptimal »

caycep wrote: post #265

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

No matter what, people are going to still use cars because they are an absolute advantage over public transportation for certain use cases. It is better that the existing status quo is improved to reduce death rates, than hope for a much larger scale change in infrastructure (when we have already seen that attempts at infrastructure overhaul in the US, like high-speed rail, is just an infinitely deep money pit)

Even though the train system in Japan is 10x better than the US as a whole, the per-capita vehicle ownership rate in Japan is not much lower than the US (779 per 1000 vs 670 per 1000). It would be a pipe dream for American trains/subways to be as good as Japan, but even a change that significant would lead to a vehicle ownership share reduced by only about 13%.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#440

Post by ajcp »

SebastianSosa wrote: post #394

Very concerned with this direction of training “counterfactual events such as whether the Waymo Driver could have safely driven more confidently instead of yielding in a particular situation.” Seems dicey. This could lead in the direction to a less safe Waymo. Since the counterfactual will be generated, I suspect that that the generations will be biased towards survivor situations where most video footage in its trai…

Not at all. It's not the counter-factual they're generating, it's the "too rare to capture often enough to train a response to" they're generating.

They're implying that without the model having knowledge, even approximate, of a scene to react to, it simply doesn't react at all; it simply "yields" to the situation until it passes. In my experience taking Waymo's almost daily this holds.

I would rather not have the Waymo yield to a tornado, rising flood-waters, or charging elephant...

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