Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere • Hacker News Board

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#441

Post by mancerayder » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

flutas wrote: post #382

nichochar wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

My favorite case so far of the '5%' that you mention happened on my Tesla irt:(object recognition) and I still laugh about it to this day. I was driving down the road as normal, 4 lane divided highway that's a bit hilly. Suddenly my car starts having what I can only describe as a panic attack saying I'm running a stop sign and blaring alarms. It was detecting a giant 40ft tall red circle sign a bit away as a stop sig…

That's interesting, because my car never has blared an alarm for that. I live in a part of the country where, in certain parts of semi-rural and hilly areas, they've decided to introduce 4-way stops instead of red lights, or to slow down traffic on a straightaway. As a result, every so often I would not realize there's a 4-way stop (luckily google maps now shows them) and stop a little late. This happened 2-3 times in the last year or two and never did the Tesla make a peep.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#442

Post by kelnos » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #311

katbyte wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird to me people forget how bad vision can be for driving and Exocet Tesla to somehow be better then our own eyes. How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun set/rain at night where it’s a total struggle to drive and you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do alright because of a ton of inference? i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded of one of the greatest blunders…

The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be possible to do self driving with vision only. That said, augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no brainer for better performance.

That counterargument only holds if Tesla can build software that can approximate the human brain. I think it's laughable to expect they can do that, at least on any reasonable timeframe.

Even if they could, a goal of self driving should be to do better than a human driver. Avoiding technology that can "see" in ways a human cannot is just short-sighted, and a huge missed opportunity.

And all that still even ignores the fact that many common environmental conditions make driving only with human eyes very unsafe. Think fog or heavy rain. A car relying only in cameras to drive in those situations will be next to useless.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#443

Post by chopin » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #255

hasmanean wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position. In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.

We could put GPS beacons on all pedestrians.

The sarcasm tags are missing.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#444

Post by Gordonjcp » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

GaylordTuring wrote: post #425

Gordonjcp wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you go by train? If you don't like driving, don't drive.

Maybe there isn’t a train available. Maybe it takes much longer time taking the train. Maybe you don’t like sitting close to other people for several hours each week. I can think of many reasons why train wouldn’t be an option.

Then it sucks to be you. Don't drive if you don't like driving. Walk, or cycle. Or get a job that doesn't require you to commute.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#445

Post by dang » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #396

dang wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.

Why? The Medium article was much better and contained a lot of other interesting angles that had nothing to do with the Bloomberg article, which was just one source of many.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Medium article is primarily a gloss on the Bloomberg article and even copies quite a lot from it.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#446

Post by evandijk70 » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #442

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be possible to do self driving with vision only. That said, augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no brainer for better performance.

That counterargument only holds if Tesla can build software that can approximate the human brain. I think it's laughable to expect they can do that, at least on any reasonable timeframe. Even if they could, a goal of self driving should be to do better than a human driver. Avoiding technology that can "see" in ways a human cannot is just short-sighted, and a huge missed opportunity. And all that still even ignores th…

Why is it laughable that Tesla can build software that approximates the human brain? There is software that is better at chess, better at go and better at poker than humans. Why is driving so special?

Agree with your other points.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#447

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #432

binarymax wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot more signal than vision only. For example audio, the “feel of the road”, like feedback on the steering wheel and traction that we physically experience. Most of all we have actual intelligence and reasoning - not just pattern recognition.

Do you drive much? It would be QUITE the stretch to say most drivers have "actual intelligence and reasoning." Pattern matching for driving is probably better, frankly. You don't have people who are stressed out, pissed off, inattentive or in a hurry doing risky stuff on the road.

[deleted]

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#448

Post by panick21_ » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

nichochar wrote: post #283

cs702 wrote: post #185

In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

George Hotz is 'in the industry' and seems to disagree with you. I have heard others say the same. It seems people who work at Waymo/Cruise are totally convinced by those things.

Different approaches lead to different paths to solutions, I am not convinced that either will be successful and not convinces Waymo/Cruise is ahead.

Unlike those, Tesla actually makes money and uses the technology stack in more limited forms.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#449

Post by panick21_ » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

joakleaf wrote: post #323

nichochar wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

As someone who also follows the progress online and watch the presentations by Cruise, Tesla, etc, I agree that Cruise is well ahead of Tesla. It feels like Tesla’s main strategy is to add more data, more compute power, more simulation, and hope for “convergence”. Maybe that will work, but right now it feels like Cruise’s technology feels more mature and thought through.

What happens if you drop a Cruise car at a random place in North America it has never seen before?

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#450

Post by panick21_ » Sun, Oct 16, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #347

joakleaf wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who also follows the progress online and watch the presentations by Cruise, Tesla, etc, I agree that Cruise is well ahead of Tesla. It feels like Tesla’s main strategy is to add more data, more compute power, more simulation, and hope for “convergence”. Maybe that will work, but right now it feels like Cruise’s technology feels more mature and thought through.

Is it? Remarkably Tesla’s compute bill does not seems to be growing exponentially with the amount of data it is supposedly collecting. Point is I would not take anything Elon says at face value. He’s a marketer who is constantly bending the truth.

Have you actually watched the presentations? They are not the NSA storing all data from all cars on a giant hard-drive.

They are deploy code to cars to search for potential interesting, take lots of sample, curate and create a test and training set from that data.

Also how do you know what the Tesla compute bill is? Given their investment in GPU clusters and their own development of Dojo their cost may well have grown exponentially.

> He’s a marketer who is constantly bending the truth.

He is also a CEO of two major companies that have a good track record of achieving interesting technology and growth. So just denigrating him to a 'marketer' says more about yourself.