Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Waymo World Model

waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 699 posts

Re: The Waymo World Model

#651

Post by jeron »

gambiting wrote: post #253
jellojello wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.

>>The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. I thought it was the Nazi salutes on stage and backing neo-nazi groups everywhere around the world, but you know, I guess the lidar thing too.

maybe it's better to say it was the biggest L of his engineering career instead of his political career

Re: The Waymo World Model

#652

Post by direwolf20 »

scoofy wrote: post #312
caycep wrote: post #265

All this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains

As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment…

Trains work in every city in Europe and Asia.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#653

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

wiz21c wrote: post #626
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense. The apparent applicability to Waymo is incidental, more likely because a few millions+ were spent on Genie and they have to do something with it. DeepMind started to train "world models" because that's the current overhyped buzzword in the industry. First it was "natural language understanding" and "question answering" back in the days of o…

notice that all these buzzwords you give actually correspond to real advances in the field. All of these were improvements on something existing, not a big revolution for sure, but definitely measurable improvements.

Those are not "real advances in the field", which is why they are constantly abandoned for the next new buzzword.

Edit:

This just in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870514#46929215

The Next Big Thing™ is going to be "context learning", at least if Tencent have their way. And why do we need that?

>> Current language models do not handle context this way. They rely primarily on parametric knowledge—information compressed into their weights during massive pre-training runs. At inference time, they function largely by recalling this static, internal memory, rather than actively learning from new information provided in the moment.

>> This creates a structural mismatch. We have optimized models to excel at reasoning over what they already know yet users need them to solve tasks that depend on messy, constantly evolving context. We built models that rely on what they know from the past, but we need context learners that rely on what they can absorb from the environment in the moment.

Yep. Reasoning is so 2025.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#654

Post by [deleted] »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #625
yummypaint wrote: post #337

By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity,…

>> How do you know the generated outputs are correct? Especially for unusual circumstances? You know the outputs are correct because the models have many billions of parameters and were trained on many years of video on many hectares of server farms. Of course they'll generate correct outputs! I mean that's literally the justification. There aren't even any benchmarks that you can beat with video generation, not even…

[deleted]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#655

Post by zipy124 »

Arainach wrote: post #536
brokencode wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a point in time when basically every well known AI researcher worked at Google. They have been at the forefront of AI research and investing heavily for longer than anybody. It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research. But they are in full gear now that there is real competition, and it’ll be cool to see what they release over th…

>It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research. Not really. If Google released all of this first instead of companies that have never made a profit and perhaps never will, the case law would simply be the copyright holders suing them for infringement and winning.

It's not even that. It's way easier to do R&D when you don't have a customer base to support.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#656

Post by devmor »

WarmWash wrote: post #61
devmor wrote: post #20

Wow, interesting timing for this PR blast considering the admission in the Senate Commerce Committee hearing. Not transparent at all!

What was the admission? That they use cheap labor to provide the waymo clarity when it is confused? That has been known for a long time.

Software doesn’t get confused - it fails. Referring to your software as autonomous when you have to staff a 24/7 response center of humans to control it is not just misleading, it’s a lie.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#657

Post by ActorNightly »

sagarm wrote: post #212
ActorNightly wrote: post #164

This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way. Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from there. Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you into the input to your driving model being vision, which means that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data, which is wasteful.

The article is about using the world model to generate simulations, not for controlling the vehicle.

They form control policy from vision data directly, which is why they need to have a massive model generate simulation vision data.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#658

Post by ActorNightly »

senordevnyc wrote: post #232
ActorNightly wrote: post #164

This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way. Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from there. Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you into the input to your driving model being vision, which means that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data, which is wasteful.

This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way. This is legit hilarious to read from some random HN account.

I posted this before, but Ill post again - this is one of the few things I feel confident enough to say that most people in the space are doing wrong. You can save my post and reference it when we actually get full self driving (i.e you can take a nap in the backseat while your car drives you), because its going to be implemented pretty much like this:

Humans don't drive well because we map vision policy to actions. We drive well (an in general, manipulate physical objects well), because we can do simulations inside our head to predict what the outcome will be. We aren't burdened by our inability to recognize certain things - when something is in the road, no matter what it is, we auto predict that we would likely collide with that thing because we understand the concept of 3d space and moving within it, and take appropriate action. Sure, there is some level of direct mapping as many people can drive while "spaced out", but attentive driving involves mostly the above.

The self driving system that can actually self drive needs to do the same. When you have this, you will no longer need to do things like simulate driving conditions in a computationally expensive sim. You aren't going to be concerned with training model on edge cases. All you would need to to ensure that your sensor processing results in a 3d representation of the driving conditions, and the model will then be able to do what humans do and explore a latent space of things it can do and predict outcomes then chose the best one.

You want proof? It exists in the form of Mu Zero, and it worked amazingly well. And driving can be easily reformated as a game that the engine plays in a simulator that doesn't involve vision, and learns both the available moves and also the optimal policy.

The reason everyone is doing end to end today is because they are basically trying to catch up to Tesla, and from a business perspective, nobody is willing to put money and pay smart enough people to research this, especially because there is also a legal bridge to cross when it comes to proving that the system can self drive while you napping. But nevertheless, if you ever want self driving, this is the right approach.

Meanwhile, Google who came up with Mu Zero, is now doing more advanced robotic stuff than anyone out there.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#659

Post by WarmWash »

devmor wrote: post #656
WarmWash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the admission? That they use cheap labor to provide the waymo clarity when it is confused? That has been known for a long time.

Software doesn’t get confused - it fails. Referring to your software as autonomous when you have to staff a 24/7 response center of humans to control it is not just misleading, it’s a lie.

It's worse than that for you, they never take control of the waymo, the waymo provides solutions but is unsure which one is correct. The people then tell the waymo which solution is the best one.

So maybe unsure is a better term than confused?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#660

Post by dwaite »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #139
jellojello wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.

It's important to understand the timeline of the Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash - at that point the iPhone had been out just shy of three years, and before the first public betas on Android. So for nearly three years, Apple had been investing in HTML5 technology because Flash wasn't in a form where it was deployable.

Additionally, Flash required android phones with 256MB ram as a minimum (which would have precluded two of the three shipped iPhone models at the time) and at least initially only supported software video decoding. Because of the difference in screen dimensions, resolutions and interaction models (plus the issues with embedding due to RAM limitations), the website was still basically broken whether your mobile phone had Flash or not.

My understanding (based on the timing) was always that when Adobe was finally ready to push its partners to bundle mobile Flash, Apple looked at it and decided against it. Adobe made public statements against their partner and so Jobs did so in kind.

Post reply on HN