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Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#71

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

Innovation is a gamble. You're not wrong to point out they might fail. The likeliness of failure is what makes it worth the gamble of trying.

Generally this is true, but in the safety critical domain you don't gamble. You do your homework and make sure you aren't exposing your users to unnecessary levels of risk.

If Tesla was developing their system with trained safety drivers or on closed courses, I think they would have higher moral ground to gamble here. But placing the untrained public behind the wheel of alpha quality software is unethical IMHO. There ways to develop autonomous software that are significantly less risky, and the only reason Tesla is doing it this way is for marketing/PR purposes as far as I can tell.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This framing is a common error in the debate. It's not cameras or lidar, it's cameras or cameras + lidar + radar. Nobody is driving on lidar alone. Many others actually have more cameras and are doing substantially more vision than Tesla is, they're just fusing lidar and radar perception with their vision pipeline. It gives you a more robust view of the world than using a single sensor modality.

One of the arguments made in this talk is which sensor to trust when there is a disagreement. I'd love to see the scenarios where this happens with three types of sensors and the logic they use to choose the "right" one.

That's a problem for deciding which system drives the thing (eg. do you use cameras for detecting oncoming cars and objects or lidar/radar), but if there are major disagreements between them it would make most sense to disengage the autonomous part and ask the human driver to take over, much like current TSLA cars do. Obviously not possible if you want level 4 self driving, but it can be good enough for level 3.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer car However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla can't really change their stance on this without adm…

> FSD options they already sold would not actually become FSD within the lifetimes of these vehicles That's pretty much a given at this point but they will not admit it until a class-action lawsuit forces them to.

But we might actually get a functioning Mars base out of this since that's where Musk will be hiding when the FTC finally wakes up /s

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. By all measures I've seen (including a couple of slides in the OP's video), Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer). I mean, the machine never gets distracted, tired, sleepy, emotional, drunk, etc., so it is a LOT LESS likely to crash on boring, monotonous road…

>Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower Still not close to good enough for people to accept: "Participants from both countries required Self Driving Vehicles to be 4-5 times as safe as Human Driven Vehicles" [0] 0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32202821/

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Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#75

He made a very good argument for vision-only, but it seems like training actually uses radar data to help calibrate vision measurements, so it seems to me there’s value in making some vehicles still contain radar (say, one out of 10) even if it’s not used for controlling the vehicle directly at drive time. Also, the sensor resolution issue he mentioned could be addressed by using a higher resolution radar sensor. I f…

> but it seems like training actually uses radar data to help calibrate vision They seem to use radar solely to automatically label data for training. In the given example though where according to the vision system smog interrupted the persistence of the label for the leading car, I wonder if the use of radar data to persist the label is strictly necessary. A car disappeared then reappeared in the data, why not just…

They use radar for way more than that given that Autopilot has it's capabilities limited in the new cars without radar vs. the old ones with radar.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#76
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer car However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla can't really change their stance on this without adm…

Is it something that can be retrofitted on existing models?

LIDARs unlikely since they require a line of sight forwards, backwards and possibly on the sides of the vehicle

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#77

I've read claims that they are desperately trying to hire. https://mobile.twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/140705191831739...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1407050578149183488?s=20

> Purpose is recruiting.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#78

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

> Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy

That doesn't mean much considering no company is getting to L5 autonomy likely in our lifetime and possibly beyond.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#79
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LIDAR is valuable as a safety feature, i.e. it can (unlike radars or cameras) reliably see (at least in clear weather) if there's anything in the car's path warranting evasion/braking maneuvers. In particular it's important that the LIDAR is dumb, i.e. its failure mores are predictable

LIDAR operates by timing how a photon reflects from a surface, it doesn't guarantee see everything. As you stated already, it cannot see in snow or rain. I am actually on sensor-fusion side, but I don't think we should jump to the conclusion LIDAR is the best 3D mapping method. For one example, a truck has a breaking distance of 600ft, either Velodyne or OS1 LIDAR has range less than that.

I agree about LIDARs not being the best general 3D mapping method, my point was mostly about using it as a dumb physics-based safety system. For autonomous trucks, limited LIDAR range could be mitigated by reducing speed accordingly and/or employing more powerful (or SWIR) LIDARs since trucks are more expensive and there could be a bigger budget for sensors

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#80
post #10
post #8

I like Andrej from his PhD research days and awesome blog posts but this is a series of disasters in the making, that is until FTC steps in after more people die from “self-driving” accidents under interesting and unexpected circumstances. The whole vision vs. LIDAR stuff is a distraction as long as Tesla “AI” doesn’t have common sense. It literally doesn’t know what it’s doing, and the tail of edge cases to "fit" th…

There are two fundamental reasons, in principle, vision alone can do it: 1) Humans do it with vision alone 2) You can actually predict lidar’s output with vision alone. So many systems out there actually use lidar to generate more labeled data to make lidar unnecessary

> Humans do it with vision alone

And despite humans having legs and birds having articulated wings, ground vehicles use wheels and airplanes use fixed wings with propellers or jets. Why?

Just because biology solves a problem a certain way doesn't make that same approach optimal for machines. Typically with machines you need to work around other systemic deficiencies.

Humans may have only two cameras, but those cameras are connected to a vision, spatial understanding, and reasoning system that is light years beyond what current day AI is capable of. But the good news is that we can make up for AI deficiencies by giving vehicles super-human sensing ability which makes those problems easier.

Tesla's approach seems to be one in which they think the sensors are the expensive/hard part and solving general AI is the cheap/easy part. I think plenty of people would not agree.

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