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GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

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Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#641

Post by ketzo »

delabay wrote: post #610
ketzo wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pose your comment like the answer is obvious, but I don’t know that it is. If Tesla can solve FSD with only cameras, then yes, their ability to scale is much better than Waymo’s. But that is a stupendously large “if”! I’ve seen the Karpathy quote before, and I think it’s kind of hilarious to compare one company which does X0,000 robotaxi rides per day, to another company which has a robotaxi maybe entering produc…

It's "hardware is hard" versus "scaling laws". Andrejs point is that software problems are easier to scale your way out of. I think we can both agree there's plenty of precedent for this line of thinking. A company cannot as easily scale their way out of lowering material costs by an order of magnitude or go from 1000 cars a year to 1M cars a year.

But the implicit assumption is that Tesla’s problems can be solved by scaling laws. That seems to me like a big assumption, no?

I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.

But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.

Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#642

Post by jcgrillo »

toast0 wrote: post #366
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a cyclist I’d rather take my chances with streetcar rails than with cars. Rails don’t appear from nowhere and hit me.

Street car rails probably won't appear from nowhere, but if your tire falls into the gap for the rail, you're very likely to crash. Seattle has a tiny amount of street car rail, but regularly pays out large damages to people injured by the rails.

I've seen people wreck super hard trying to cross the streetcar rails at too shallow an angle in pdx multiple times. But that's an optional behavior. Just the other day I saw a moose crossing the road over in Twin Mountain, and I chose to slow down and not hit it. If I'd made another choice that resulted in a collision, and I'd survived, I wouldn't expect to get some settlement from the town of Twin Mountain, NH. Similarly if you ride your bike into a train track that one's pretty much on you lol.. being aware of one's surroundings is one of those basic life skills.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#643

Post by vlovich123 »

goalonetwo wrote: post #595
ethagknight wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SuperCruise and FSD are not comparable. SuperCruise does what it claims to do, keep it up the middle on listed corridors. Most highways and interstates are eligible. I love both systems. FSD is truly almost there for unsupervised, point to point driving. People want to virtue signal and complain about Tesla but it is an amazing piece of hardware being mass produced today. My car is 3 years old.

I worked in this industry. No, FSD is not almost there. Not even close. What matters is the long tails of events. You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.

We need to compare against the real human error rate (including drunk drivers, sleepy drivers etc). What is that error rate?

Also, fault tolerance error rates don’t work that way - difficulty increases exponentially as you increase fault. In other words, it’s much more difficult than three orders of magnitude to go from 3 9s to 6 9s - it’s easily 5-6 orders of magnitude.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#644

Post by floxy »

jcgrillo wrote: post #640
floxy wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. I think lots of other people would like to keep their refrigerator and freezer and appliances running in the event of multi-day power outages when they are at home, even when it is not freezing (like in Florida, for example).

Sure, but if you're already going to make the investment in the grid cutoff, inverter, etc then the fact the car could in principle act as a battery/generator is a little gimmicky. Might as well also get a generator (or battery if you've already got solar). Then it works automatically whether you're there or not.

The vehicle already has the inverter, using the same active rectifier hardware in the on-board charger. People want to have electricity when they are at home. And they are home a lot of the time. So I agree that it is a very niche case to want to have a backup system to provide electricity to your house during a natural disaster when you are not even there.

https://gmenergy.gm.com/for-home/products/vehicle-to-home-so...

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#645

Post by jcgrillo »

floxy wrote: post #644
jcgrillo wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you're already going to make the investment in the grid cutoff, inverter, etc then the fact the car could in principle act as a battery/generator is a little gimmicky. Might as well also get a generator (or battery if you've already got solar). Then it works automatically whether you're there or not.

The vehicle already has the inverter, using the same active rectifier hardware in the on-board charger. People want to have electricity when they are at home. And they are home a lot of the time. So I agree that it is a very niche case to want to have a backup system to provide electricity to your house during a natural disaster when you are not even there. https://gmenergy.gm.com/for-home/products/vehicle-to-home-so…

OK but you still need a grid cutoff--you absolutely can't put power into the grid when it's down. It's not a huge investment, but it's not nothing.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#646

Post by delabay »

ketzo wrote: post #641
delabay wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "hardware is hard" versus "scaling laws". Andrejs point is that software problems are easier to scale your way out of. I think we can both agree there's plenty of precedent for this line of thinking. A company cannot as easily scale their way out of lowering material costs by an order of magnitude or go from 1000 cars a year to 1M cars a year.

But the implicit assumption is that Tesla’s problems can be solved by scaling laws. That seems to me like a big assumption, no? I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think. But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by sca…

Waymo (and my lived experience with FSD) is proof the end goal is obtainable.

We're surrounded by AI miracles, this website is full of examples, yet people can't conceive of Tesla reaching this finish line. It's pretty odd.

I've clocked 20k miles on FSD. In the brief period I've used it I've seen step improvements. I guess in my mind it's a foregone conclusion with no breakthroughs required. All I need to believe is on the Tesla earning reports, which is Tesla data center build progress (training) and vehicles sold (data)

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#647

Post by ethagknight »

goalonetwo wrote: post #595
ethagknight wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SuperCruise and FSD are not comparable. SuperCruise does what it claims to do, keep it up the middle on listed corridors. Most highways and interstates are eligible. I love both systems. FSD is truly almost there for unsupervised, point to point driving. People want to virtue signal and complain about Tesla but it is an amazing piece of hardware being mass produced today. My car is 3 years old.

I worked in this industry. No, FSD is not almost there. Not even close. What matters is the long tails of events. You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.

I disagree with you. Glad you worked in the industry, I am using FSD daily, it is really excellent.

Re: GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

#648

Post by iknowstuff »

whoitwas wrote: post #607
iknowstuff wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link said data please

I'm not sure what you want. The NHTSA investigated using Tesla's data and found 956 crashes caused by these types of system failures: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf If you simply search for things like "tesla direct sunlight", "tesla camera condensation", "tesla camera bad weather", you can see thousands of instances of vehicle cameras not working.

zero instances of sunlight in that pdf or “tesla’s data”
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