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GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

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Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#71
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post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does). Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather cond…

Do you have a source of this data? Is Tesla releasing all their interventions. Cruise interventions are all submitted to the state of California as part of their self driving certification.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#72
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post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company decides the level. Tesla's approach is to get more real-world training data to reach a general solution, while Waymo goes slow with pre-mapping as a requirement. Tesla's approach will likely be the winner long-term and can be flipped on globally far faster than Waymo's could

Everyone’s working on a general solution, including Waymo. Everyone has large real world (and even larger simulated) training data. It’s not just Tesla despite what is widely claimed in Tesla circles. Others just choose to deploy in certain places because of market, operational and safety reasons. This notion of Tesla just ingesting training data which magically outputs a general self driving solution is nonsense. Th…

I said approach, not vanity. Having 200,000+ safety drivers across the U.S. and classifying it as level 2 is Tesla's approach.

Waymo's approach is a Level 4 system from the start, but in a very limited operating environments, and slowly expanding.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#73
post #72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s working on a general solution, including Waymo. Everyone has large real world (and even larger simulated) training data. It’s not just Tesla despite what is widely claimed in Tesla circles. Others just choose to deploy in certain places because of market, operational and safety reasons. This notion of Tesla just ingesting training data which magically outputs a general self driving solution is nonsense. Th…

I said approach, not vanity. Having 200,000+ safety drivers across the U.S. and classifying it as level 2 is Tesla's approach. Waymo's approach is a Level 4 system from the start, but in a very limited operating environments, and slowly expanding.

They're classifying it as level 2 because that's all the system is capable of. You can choose to call it an approach, but it's really an indicator of capability.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

> and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service Waymo isn’t profitable and has been a massive money loser over the past several years. See “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s earnings. Where does this claim come from?

It's based on public comments about the per-mile cost of Cruise and Waymo, and the fact that Waymo is currently operating in only a tiny number of areas. Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs, and iterating on the hardware will drive down the marginal/capital costs.

Amazon made no profit for many, many years, but that's because they were re-investing all their revenue. No one doubted that they could have turned a profit if they wanted. (Tbc, there is not yet a component of Waymo that is profitable because, as mentioned, they are just operating in a handful of cities.)

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#75

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

And I was in a Tesla 3 in sunny weather about 2 months ago, and it nearly crashed into a tow truck and a cyclist that it didn't see. It's embarrassingly bad at handling basic use cases and it pretty much the poster boy for why vision alone won't work for actual self-driving.

Tesla vision gets confused by shadows when it is sunny. Its the new phantom braking when using the Tesla vision stack on freeways. Before it was low hanging freeway signs that the radar picked up.

Also it can't figure out lanes at all and is always trying to change lanes into the wrong lane. The navigate on Autopilot stack seemed better than the current FSD stack.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#76
There’s an entirely different way of looking at this that is perfectly in line with why self driving. Cars have failed several times before…

Who is liable?

That’s what largely killed prior attempts, especially those using custom built roads. If the car crashes who is liable - the manufacturer, the road builder, or the driver? I think it is telling that the pull back we’re seeing is correlated with early cases in this becoming more salient.

Why does this have to be a technical limitation/success (im not saying it is or isn’t) only?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#77
post #53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving) Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.

Tesla doesn't have self driving though. Its level 2. Mercedes has level 3 cars on the road where the driver can legally watch a movie or read a book. Level matters but it dictates what the driver can legally do. Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving, Tesla makes the driver 100% liable. There's a huge difference.

> Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving

That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#78

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon…

Did the windshield wipers actually work?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works most of the time but the issue is that "most of the time" is not good enough for these systems. Even if the failure rate is People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability an…

> Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar Why? Won't this lead to a lot of needless deaths at the hands of human drivers while we wait for driverless cars to improve? Why not roll them out once they are safer than human drivers?

Well think about it this way:

I'm a driver, but I'm a safer than average driver. So why would I want a system that's better than "average" where average includes drunk people, speeders, new/bad drivers, driving in ice, etc.

I don't think it should be illegal to use a system that's actually better than average (which is 1 accident every 18 years), but many drivers might not want to.

Also when some company's financial success hinges on them reporting their safety being above a certain accident threshhold, I think any statistics provided by that company on safety should be doubted unless an indepedent third party can verify them.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#80
post #2

Once again, George was right. Self driving will be solved with vision alone, or it will never be solved. And solving for vision means solving for AGI.

Vision is necessary but lidar and other sensor types are probably going to be a powerful supplement. One can possibly compensate for an inferior “brain” by having more kinds of data to discern meaning from.

George Hotz take was that vision alone could be trained to get to human or near human driving ability, but that the sensor fusion part was confusing the machine learning and much harder to get to that level.

Maybe he'll be wrong in the future but for now even Tesla seems to have pulled the radar stuff from their cars.

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