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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#61

Post by lacker »

garbawarb wrote: post #4

I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)

It seems tough culturally.

If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.

So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.

It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#62

Post by girvo »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #12
xnx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.

According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450

Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#64

Post by hnuser123456 »

ilaksh wrote: post #58

The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time. It's weird how many people there are like that still. But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.

Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#65

Post by gulfofamerica »

iwontberude wrote: post #50
_diyar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possib…

I think his companies succeeded despite Elon. Tesla should be a $5T company and he fucked it up.

[dead]

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#66

Post by devmor »

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?

For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#67

Post by ForHackernews »

RivieraKid wrote: post #36
garbawarb wrote: post #4

I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)

This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some…

What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.

That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#68

Post by baggachipz »

hamdingers wrote: post #42
xnx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly. I don't understand why Tesla fans think camera/lidar fusion is unsolvable but camera/camera fusion is a non-issue.

Because they bought a Tesla with only cameras on it. Admitting this would be admitting their Tesla will never be self driving.

I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#69

Post by autoexec »

agildehaus wrote: post #55
aggie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach. But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.

Waymo has posted videos of accidents they've avoided purely because their lidar picked up on a pedestrian before their cameras saw anything. A favorite of mine: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1900219562437861685

They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. (https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf...)

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#70

Post by jacquesm »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #12
xnx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.

According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450

Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.

No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.

This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.

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