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

661–670 of 699 posts

Re: The Waymo World Model

#661

Post by wolrah »

disillusioned wrote: post #554
wolrah wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance Also subtle head and eye movements, which is something a lot of people like to ignore when discussing camera-based autonomy. Your eyes are always moving around which changes the perspective and gives a much better view of depth as we observe parallax effects. If you need a better view in a given direct…

Easiest example I always give of this is pulling out of the alley behind my house: there is a large bush that occludes my view left to oncoming traffic, badly. I do what every human does: 1. Crane my neck forward, see if I can see around it. 2. Inch forward a bit more, keep craning my neck. 3. Recognize, no, I'm still occluded. 4. Count on the heuristic analysis of the light filtering through the bush and determine i…

> owing to its height and the distance it can receive from,

And, importantly, the fender-mount LIDARs. It doesn't just have the one on the roof, it has one on each corner too.

I first took a Waymo as a curiosity on a recent SF trip, just a few blocks from my hotel east on Lombard to Hyde and over to the Buena Vista to try it out, and I was immediately impressed when we pulled up the hill to Larkin and it saw a pedestrian that was out of view behind a building from my perspective. Those real-time displays went a long way to allowing me to quickly trust that the vehicle's systems were aware of what's going on around it and the relevant traffic signals. Plenty of sensors plus a detailed map of a specific environment work well.

Compare that to my Ioniq5 which combines one camera with a radar and a few ultrasonic sensors and thinks a semi truck is a series of cars constantly merging in to each other. I trust it to hold a lane on the highway and not much else, which is basically what they sell it as being able to do. I haven't seen anything that would make me trust a Tesla any further than my own car and yet they sell it as if it is on the verge of being able to drive you anywhere you want on its own.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#662

Post by LorenPechtel »

boredtofears wrote: post #591
ruszki wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is lane keeping really a solved problem? Just last year one of my brand new rented cars tried to kill me a few times when I tried it again, and so far not even the simple lane leaving detection mechanism worked properly in any of the tried cars when it was raining.

What problem is it even solving? Keeping my car straight so I can be less attentive on the road? I get it in the context of driverless but find it nothing but annoying as a driver.

Adaptive cruise control requires some degree of lane detection. It has to figure out what car it's actually following, not merely what car is in front of it. (The road is turning, the car in front of you can easily not be the car you are actually behind.)

Re: The Waymo World Model

#663

Post by nunez »

magguzu wrote: post #619
nunez wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow public transit fan, you're on the money. Even the shining stars of transit in the US --- NYC MTA subway and CTA --- have huge qualuty of life issues. I can't fault someone for not wanting to ride trains ever again when someone who hasn't showered in 41 years pulls up with a cart full of whatever the fuck and decides to squat the corner seat closest to the car door and be a living biological weapon during…

Is that a public transit problem or a societal/homelessness problem?

It doesn't matter in this context. What matters is the hypothetical person in my post thinking "this is what will happen if my city proposes a train" and voting against any legislation trying to bring this forward where they live, even if they hate driving everywhere.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#664

Post by MisterMower »

themafia wrote: post #262
zzzeek wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and they're all controlled by (poorly compensated) humans anyway [1] [2] [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/i-tried-the-robot-tha... [2] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...

They couldn't even make burger flipping robots work and are paying fast food workers $20/hr in California. If that doesn't make it obvious what they can and cannot do then I can't respect the tranche of "hackers" who blindly cheer on this unchecked corporate dystopian nightmare.

They can totally make it work, it’s just currently cheaper to have humans do it.

Solving the technical challenges and using that solution profitably are two completely different things.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#665

Post by devmor »

WarmWash wrote: post #659
devmor wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t think anthropomorphizing an algorithm is the right approach to discussing this topic. It’s still failing software.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#666

Post by monocasa »

rswail wrote: post #539
monocasa wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I would take a robot to handle all of my housework. Purpose built, that probably takes the form of a humanoid robot since all of tasks it needs to do were previously designed for humanoids.

Vacuuming and mopping are not inherently "designed" for humans. Dusting with a single extensible and multiple degrees of freedom arm would be much more maneuverable than a human arm. Loading and unloading washing machines or dryers or doign the same for dishes and cutlery in a dishwasher is not inherently designed for humans. If anything, selling an integrated "housekeeping" system that fits into an existing laundry…

I agree that each would be made slightly better with a more integrated system. But you could handle all of them in my hundred year old house with the form factor it was designed for: a humanoid. Probably pretty soon here for cheaper than each could be handled separately by more integrated systems.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#667

Post by rfv6723 »

The "world model" is a convenient fiction. Whether we’re talking about a carbon-based brain or a silicon-based transformer, there is no miniature, objective map of reality tucked away inside. What we mistake for a "model" is actually just the layered residue of experience.

From the perspective of enactivism and radical empiricism, intelligence doesn't "represent" the world; it simply navigates it. A biological organism doesn't need a 3D CAD file of a tree to survive; it only needs a history of sensory-motor contingencies—the "if I move this way, I see that" patterns. It’s a synthesis of interactions, not a library of blueprints.

AI operates on the same logic, albeit through a different medium. It isn't simulating the physical laws of the universe or "understanding" gravity. Instead, it navigates the high-dimensional geometry of human data. It’s a sophisticated engine of association, performing a high-speed synthesis of the patterns we've left behind.

In this view, "knowing" isn't about matching an internal image to an external truth. It is the seamless flow of past inputs into future predictions. There is no world model—only the habit of being.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#668

Post by gbnwl »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #653
wiz21c wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might be salty because the words become overused and overhyped, and often 90% of the people jumping on the bandwagon are indeed just parroting the new hot buzzword and don't really understand what they're talking about. But the terms you mentioned are all obviously very real and and very important in applications using LLMs today. Are you arguing that reasoning was vaporware? None of these things were meant to the be the final stop of the journey, just the next step.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#669

Post by drewstiff »

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.

Also think of how LLMs are replacing web searches for most people - Google would have been cannibalising their Search profits for no good reason

Re: The Waymo World Model

#670

Post by xnx »

sznio wrote: post #646
disillusioned wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blackouts circumstance was because they escalate blinking/out of service traffic lights to a human confirmed decision, and they experienced a bottleneck spike in those requests for how little they were staffed. The Waymo itself was fine and was prepared to make the correct decision, it just needed a human in the loop. In the video from the parade... there's just... people in the road. Like, a lot of small childre…

>The blackouts circumstance was because they escalate blinking/out of service traffic lights to a human confirmed decision Which isn't really a scalable solution. In my city the majority of streetlights switch to blinking yellow at night, with priority/yield signs instead. I can't imagine a human having to approve 10 of these on any route.

From their blog post they give the sense that they had the human review "just to be safe", but didn't anticipate this scenario. They've probably adjusted that manual review rule and will let the cars do what they would've done anyway without waiting for manual review/approval.
Post reply on HN