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Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

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Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its incomparable though. The Pegasus has far more compute power. Just because the Pegasus has 500W worst-case TDP doesn't mean that its average case would be 500W constant. If you scale back your code and idle parts of the GPU, you can drop the energy cost arbitrarily. At least, that's how GPUs on desktops work. They only use a ton of power if you give them a ton of work. Write your code in an energy-efficient manner…

Pegasus's chip is more general purpose and doubtless has far more general purpose compute power. But that's irrelevant. What's relevant is Tesla's chip is optimized specifically for their NN pipeline whereas Pegasus is based off of general purpose GPU architecture, thus Tesla's chip achieves a better TOPS per Watt than Pegasus. And it'd be strange if it didn't. "Tesla's chip will NEVER be able to scale above 100W" ok…

> Pegasus has 500W at 320 TOPS. Tesla's has 72 Watts at 144TOPS.

Theoretical TOPS which can only ever execute within the 32MB SRAM that Tesla has created. Otherwise, Tesla's compute chip is stuck at 68 GBps LPDDR4 RAM. Pretty slow.

Pegasus uses HBM2 chips at 500GBps. Pegasus will be able to efficiently compute neural networks that are larger than 32MB in size.

Tesla is making big bets about this tiny 32MB SRAM. Bits and pieces of the CNN can fit in there, but almost certainly not the entire neural network.

You're right that this is a specialized chip. But even for NN / Deep Learning inference, it seems a bit underpowered to me from a RAM perspective

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#542
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really an ASIC? I thought they said over and over it is full custom.

Definition from wikipedia: > An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC /ˈeɪsɪk/) is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. Is there anything more "custom" than an ASIC?

I suppose both are still called an ASIC. What I'm wondering is if it is gate-array/semi custom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate...

or full custom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate...

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pegasus's chip is more general purpose and doubtless has far more general purpose compute power. But that's irrelevant. What's relevant is Tesla's chip is optimized specifically for their NN pipeline whereas Pegasus is based off of general purpose GPU architecture, thus Tesla's chip achieves a better TOPS per Watt than Pegasus. And it'd be strange if it didn't. "Tesla's chip will NEVER be able to scale above 100W" ok…

> Pegasus has 500W at 320 TOPS. Tesla's has 72 Watts at 144TOPS. Theoretical TOPS which can only ever execute within the 32MB SRAM that Tesla has created. Otherwise, Tesla's compute chip is stuck at 68 GBps LPDDR4 RAM. Pretty slow. Pegasus uses HBM2 chips at 500GBps. Pegasus will be able to efficiently compute neural networks that are larger than 32MB in size. Tesla is making big bets about this tiny 32MB SRAM. Bits…

Specmanship doesn't matter. What matters is how fast it's able to execute on the task at hand and for what cost in terms of purchase price and energy.

Nvidia's offering can be really good, and so can Tesla's.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#544

I watch Tesla fairly closely from both the bull and bear sides. In short, I don't believe Tesla is anywhere close to Waymo. They won't achieve FSD in 2020. It's important to see this event in the context of their significant demand and cash problems. Even enthusiastic Tesla investors like Galileo Russell suggested that Tesla is in a cash crunch and should raise money. Which hints at the main mystery about Tesla, why…

Aside from the timing of this event, why else are you convinced that Tesla is nowhere close to Waymo?

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#545
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the more interesting question is not whether there will be corner cases where self-driving fails, but when the average performance is so much better than humans that AI saves 10s if not 100s of lives every day, but that's still a reality where AI driving software could be actively out there involved in the deaths of a single digit number of different people a day or week. Do you deploy that build or not?

For sure deploy if the numbers are right. It's the edge cases that are interesting. Cameras are fine in the day, but when I struggle to see at night, in the rain, with spray from cars, glare from on coming traffic... that's where I would LOVE to have a lidar assisted heads up display. How Tesla think they can do better with just cameras compared to another car with cameras AND lidar just baffles the mind.

Not better in absolute terms, but better in terms of the best car for a certain price. Sure a $200k car with redundant LIDAR and horribly inefficient aerodynamics because a giant spheres on top (like weymo) might be better than a $50k with just cameras.

But the hard part is the software, and it's unclear that the added complexity of lidar + camera will allow the software to be better than just cameras.

As an example a recent study at Cornell shows that a stereo pair of cameras mounted high up behind the windshield provided similar quality 3d data to LIDAR. Search for "Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving" or the more consumer friendly "Elon Musk Was Right: Cheap Cameras Could Replace Lidar on Self-Driving Cars, Researchers Find".

Seems much easier to work on a stereo video stream that includes 2D, color, and extracted 3D features than trying to achieve sensor fusion with lidar + video. Especially if you want to make full use of color for things like brake lights, traffic signals, color/markings of an ambulance, school bus, lane markings, and other important details that are invisible to LIDAR.

Especially consider that if weather is terrible and the camera vision is so bad that only 5mph is safe. If LIDAR can see significantly better, do you allow it to drive at 50 mph because it can see 200 feet? For just social reasons it seems like driving as much like a human as possible is going to be best until all cars are autonmous.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People drive vision only. No we don't. We have vision which we then interpret with our _minds_. We have the ability to _understand_ what we are seeing, reason from it, and make decisions accordingly. "Deep Learning", no matter how big your dataset, fundamentally cannot possess this capability. Which goes a long way into explaining why Tesla's "self driving" tech keeps on killing people in situations that are trivia…

> "Deep Learning", no matter how big your dataset, fundamentally cannot possess this capability. Why not? I’d agree that current models can’t, but what’s the fundamental shortcoming of deep learning?

The fundamental shortcoming is that there can be no understanding, and therefore no judgement, because there is no mind. See Searle's [in]famous Chinese Room Argument (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/). Or for a more concrete example from today: https://twitter.com/mit_csail/status/1121447605412741120?s=2...

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the way I'm imagining it is some sort of collision avoidance system, where the person drives but the computer can also put on the brake? It seems like that could be safer (although it could still cause an accident by braking in certain situations like in an intersection). If the self-driving system does other things to reduce accidents like leaving greater margins of safety for other drivers (by stopping less s…

> Do you think self driving cars should be prohibited as long as they are less safe than the standard set by human+collision avoidance cars? If having a human in the car reduces the accident rate, then I propose making it necessary for the human to be in the car. Are you advocating that we make roads unsafe so that disabled people be able to take taxis more? > I don't see why the safety standard should be even higher…

Safety is important, but I don't think any amount of safety is worth any amount of negative externalities. I mean there's things we could do right now that would make things more safe. We could ban everyone with older cars from driving (since they don't have as many safety features). We could ban everyone from the roads that has a somewhat-higher than average accident rate. We could ban all people past a certain age. If safety is always more important than access to transportation we should do those things.

I disagree with those, so I also disagree with the premise that having a human in the car should be required for any amount of increased safety. I think the amount matters. And keep in mind we are only talking about safety increases from present day, you're just proposing to ban them in order to achieve a greater safety increase.

My >90 year old grandmother still drives. She hasn't run anyone over, but I imagine her reaction time isn't the best. Apparently it's common for cops to be lenient with elderly folks who are known bad drivers, since in many areas they wouldn't be able to get groceries or go to the doctor otherwise. I'd argue that maintaining the status quo (by having a blanket policy) for many groups of drivers would probably be safety theater instead of anything real.

Lastly, I touched on this in my earlier post, but if you care about deaths it's very important to consider what cars are actually being replaced in addition to individual car statistics. Imagine in scenario A, 10 million older cars are replaced by 10 million driver-assist cars, and scenario B where 30 million older cars are replaced by 15 million self-driving taxis. Assume the driver-assist car is safer than the self-driving car, which is safer than the older car. Even so, the driver assist scenario may have thousands more deaths, since the uptake rate is different. And this is without taking into account any safety-improving software updates, which are very difficult to estimate but may be very significant statistically.

A simple per-car comparison may lead to all of the negative externalities and thousands of more people killed. I really do not see how that outcome could be justified in the name of "safety". At the very least, even if safety is the first and only concern, policy makers should try to minimize vehicular deaths which requires considering things at the fleet level.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#549
post #461

I watch Tesla fairly closely from both the bull and bear sides. In short, I don't believe Tesla is anywhere close to Waymo. They won't achieve FSD in 2020. It's important to see this event in the context of their significant demand and cash problems. Even enthusiastic Tesla investors like Galileo Russell suggested that Tesla is in a cash crunch and should raise money. Which hints at the main mystery about Tesla, why…

If I were a billionaire and I wanted to change the world, I would put pressure on existing companies by creating a competing company and pretending extraordinary achievements. Truth or not, failure or not, Musk moves forward the hopes and expectations, and I'm thankful just for that. I don't see how we can blame him for taking position

Wow. This sums up the incredible attitude of some Musk followers. And I say follower because it is literally like a cult. To this individual, Musk can do no wrong.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#550
I think it’s a safe assumption that driver alertness positively correlates with lives saved. But it’s hard to market this product with the sort of rhetoric that would optimize for that, so they’ve found a few ways to console themselves as they name the feature “autopilot” and endeavor to make the tech appear magical.

If they think they’ve cleared the bar just by beating the crash statistics of all cars, then they are still in the business of trading lives.

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