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Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

techcrunch.com

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Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#61

Post by tonyquart »

yalogin wrote: post #8

Bear with me here, trying to come at this from the other end. Why do Uber and Lyft have to develop their own self driving tech? If what they sell is their routing algorithm for drivers, they can simply lease self driving cars from the companies directly and run them on their network. The car companies would be happy to get a cut of the profits. What advantage would they get by developing their own tech? They have to…

I have just read at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid... a little bit about this topic. I think it's always interesting to talk about this future technology. However, for now, I wouldn't risk my family to ride inside one of these self-driving cars. They haven't 100% perfect/safe. Maybe 10 more years.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#62

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mbesto wrote: post #52
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billions of dollars Production isn’t simply a throw-money-at-it problem. And in any case, if you can get billions to build you can get billions to buy.

Mr Musk would like to have a word with you.

> Mr Musk would like to have a word with you

Tesla had much more than massive capital availability. If anything, it spent most of its life at a significant capital deficiency relative to the competition.

For Tesla, there was nothing to buy. The only option was to build.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#63

Post by edshiro »

trhway wrote: post #41
edshiro wrote: post #28

> The first car from Lyft’s Level 5 self-driving initiative will be the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Lyft’s use of a Ford Fusion apparently isn’t associated with the partnership the two announced last year. Other AV companies have used the Ford Fusion as a platform for integrating self-driving technologies Why are we still talking about Level 5 autonomous driving when we can't even get Level 4 working properly? I believe this…

>Why are we still talking about Level 5 autonomous driving when we can't even get Level 4 working properly? I believe this is sending the wrong message. i think it is capability gap between tech companies and car companies. Car companies can't even get cameras around all the body to avoid accidental scratches during parking. Where is tech companies, while could easily do a lot of car tech, have no business case doing…

Traditional car companies are also working on autonomous vehicles.

There is a lot of business to be had with Level 4. While the car may not be able to go everywhere, in restricted areas a robot-taxi/shuttle service would be a great advancement. We would all love to be at Level 5 but I would take a solid Level 4 in a few years instead of waiting much much longer for a viable Level 5 solution.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#64

Post by maccam94 »

Animats wrote: post #19

This focus on detailed mapping is misplaced. Most driving problems come from moving obstacles.

It's not like everything stops moving on the road when self-driving car cameras start scanning. "Mapping" isn't just establishing fixed elements, but also learning how things move and obstruct each other.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#65

Post by megablast »

bunderbunder wrote: post #11
yalogin wrote: post #8

Bear with me here, trying to come at this from the other end. Why do Uber and Lyft have to develop their own self driving tech? If what they sell is their routing algorithm for drivers, they can simply lease self driving cars from the companies directly and run them on their network. The car companies would be happy to get a cut of the profits. What advantage would they get by developing their own tech? They have to…

Uber and Lyft have very little moat to protect them if someone else develops self-driving cars first. They haven't succeeded in their initial goal of exterminating the existing cab companies, and that leaves them in a situation where developing self-driving technology could be a matter of life and death for them. The incumbent cab companies are much better positioned to profit from self-driving cars. They've already…

I think you are very wrong. Uber and Lyft are better positioned than the taxi companies. They are bigger, have more money, and could even let other people buy the cars, and let them run them. Taxi's have nothing but people, which is something you don't need, and old cars.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#66

Post by mijamo »

darawk wrote: post #46
skywhopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on whether it’s the right data, or meaningful data. The idea that Lyft needs this acquisition in order to implement video capture from its drivers’ cell phones is laughable so something else is going on with this acquisition. But to your point, the assumption that this is even a problem of “not enough data” is questionable at this point. How to turn that data into results is something no one has come close to…

> Depends on whether it’s the right data, or meaningful data. Street level mapping data isn't relevant or meaningful? Basically every company working on this problem seems to pretty strongly disagree with you. > But to your point, the assumption that this is even a problem of “not enough data” is questionable at this point. How to turn that data into results is something no one has come close to figuring out yet. Thi…

Given infinote fata, infine storage and infinite computing you would be right. In practice it means you are wrong. Feeding more data does not necessarily help given a finite amount of computing power.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#67

Post by lolc »

soared wrote: post #34
lolc wrote: post #30

> In effect, every Lyft vehicle in operation today, with a smartphone on the dashboard, could be commandeered to become a “camera” watching, surveying and mapping the roads that those cars drive on, and how humans behave on them, using that to help Lyft’s autonomous vehicle (AV) platform learn more about driving overall. Another instance of the "more data is better" fallacy. Humans can drive cars safely after only fi…

How is having recorded video of actual roads not valuable data? You're assuming the only option is training self driving cars on it. They might be training something totally separate to recognize signs, or see damaged roads, how quickly pedestrians react at different times of day, etc. Very narrow view point for you to take.

I agree that having detailed maps is an advantage. But they only make you a better driver in the places where they are correct. As such you can't rely on them to learn to drive, because you must be able to adapt to changes. Driving is not about the best case, but about the worst case.

Using uncalibrated and random positioned phone cameras to learn about driving a car that has better sensory equipment seems backwards to me. But point taken, the article says "learn more about driving overall." So that could be anything.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#68

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

darawk wrote: post #39
lolc wrote: post #30

> In effect, every Lyft vehicle in operation today, with a smartphone on the dashboard, could be commandeered to become a “camera” watching, surveying and mapping the roads that those cars drive on, and how humans behave on them, using that to help Lyft’s autonomous vehicle (AV) platform learn more about driving overall. Another instance of the "more data is better" fallacy. Humans can drive cars safely after only fi…

> Another instance of the "more data is better" fallacy. More data is better. The fact that humans have better algorithms that need less data does absolutely nothing to negate this.

More data is necessary with current technoloogy, in the sense that modern statistical machine learning algorithms are very bad at generalising to unseen data, and the only way to overcome this is to give them more examples.

There are machine learning techniques that generalise well from few data, but they are not very well known in the industry.

Also, though more speculatively, I think the idea of "lots of data" is attractive to marketing departments. There's something about algorithms that need huge amounts of data and compute, that only a select few companies can use. I guess it gives bragging rights, of a sort: "we got the biggest data around. Buy our stuff!".

But like I say, that's speculation on my part.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#69

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

darawk wrote: post #46
skywhopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on whether it’s the right data, or meaningful data. The idea that Lyft needs this acquisition in order to implement video capture from its drivers’ cell phones is laughable so something else is going on with this acquisition. But to your point, the assumption that this is even a problem of “not enough data” is questionable at this point. How to turn that data into results is something no one has come close to…

> Depends on whether it’s the right data, or meaningful data. Street level mapping data isn't relevant or meaningful? Basically every company working on this problem seems to pretty strongly disagree with you. > But to your point, the assumption that this is even a problem of “not enough data” is questionable at this point. How to turn that data into results is something no one has come close to figuring out yet. Thi…

>> This is trivially false. Given infinite data, all possible situations would be represented in the data, and the solutions applied in those situations could be copied exactly, something that existing algorithms are completely capable of doing.

In principle. In practice, you'd need infinite time and infinite storage.

Btw, do you have to add stuff like "This is trivially false" to your comments? It doesn't make your comments sound more right, only less well considered.

Re: Lyft speeds ahead with its autonomous initiatives

#70

Post by blattimwind »

trhway wrote: post #41
edshiro wrote: post #28

> The first car from Lyft’s Level 5 self-driving initiative will be the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Lyft’s use of a Ford Fusion apparently isn’t associated with the partnership the two announced last year. Other AV companies have used the Ford Fusion as a platform for integrating self-driving technologies Why are we still talking about Level 5 autonomous driving when we can't even get Level 4 working properly? I believe this…

>Why are we still talking about Level 5 autonomous driving when we can't even get Level 4 working properly? I believe this is sending the wrong message. i think it is capability gap between tech companies and car companies. Car companies can't even get cameras around all the body to avoid accidental scratches during parking. Where is tech companies, while could easily do a lot of car tech, have no business case doing…

> Car companies can't even get cameras around all the body to avoid accidental scratches during parking.

This has been a feature introduced by most car companies in the last ten or so years.

By the way, I don't think any Tesla car has this.

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