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The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

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Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#81

Post by steveBK123 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
dragontamer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliabl…

I wonder if, for the cost spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out .

No because its a political and labor relations problem not a cost problem

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#82

Post by dragontamer »

sgrove wrote: post #59
dragontamer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-c... > On December 29, 2020, FRA announced that PTC technology is in operation on all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles, prior to the December 31, 2020 statutory deadline set forth by Congress. We got that. We literally got that.

I suspect the OP may be more interested in nationwide, convenient, affordable, automated passenger rail. Which in the US is possibly (?) several orders of magnitude more in terms of capital investment compared to both electrifying the entire ICE fleet and automating it.

The majority of the costs of passenger rail is in the land-costs of placing those statins (and rail-lines) somewhere important.

The US Freight Rail network is just the right place to deploy this technology right now. We may have crappy passenger systems, but our freight is world class.

EDIT: It should be noted that PTC sensors cost $50,000 per train. But each train costs $2+ million, so the PTC sensors aren't that much compared to the overall system. The idea of having a similar suite of $50,000+ sensors / radios on every car is clearly too costly in contrast.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#83

Post by samstave »

rini17 wrote: post #70
samstave wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions... Which networking protocol best maps to this? And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection... I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campus…

Large part of TCP is dealing with dropped packets. Presumably you don't want that to carry that over to rail/road traffic :)

HAHAH yes, I know -- I just didnt have a better example protocol... TCP is "ensuring the traffic gets there" -- not so much "ensuring no collisions" that was why I chose that one.

Maybe BGP instead? "Route failed - go this way instead, as a backup"

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#84

Post by josefx »

nightski wrote: post #71
dragontamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PTC, from my understanding, is that the train gets "positive orders" from a central server. The central server says "It is safe to move through X", and the train then moves through X. If the sensor in X is broken, then the server will say "I cannot prove it is safe to move through X", and the train will stop. I'm not a transportation engineer however, so I'll defer to anyone with actual experience in the field. But t…

Wow that sounds like a fantastic failure mode for a busy freeway on a prime commute day when someone nefariously interferes with the system.

Just break the traffic lights of a few busy intersections near the freeway. If they are in any way like the ones in my home country then the only protection for the cables is a cover locked in place by a single screw.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#85

Post by immmmmm »

not fully related but i was doing some reading on various "new sustainable ways of transportation" and, since they're building the biggest hyperloop test track near my place, i found this interesting video of some of problems one might get trying to put vacuum in a pipe:

https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#86

Post by zozbot234 »

cr4zy wrote: post #76

Trillion parameter networks are mentioned a few times, but Tesla is deploying much smaller networks than that (like tens of millions IMU). Trillion param networks are mostly transformers like GPT-3 (actually 175B) etc... that are particularly heavy vs Conv as they have no weight sharing. Tesla is definitely starting to use transformers though, e.g. for camera fusion and evidenced by their focus on matrix multiply in…

Yup, there's plenty of ML architectures that try to save on parameters size, achieving better generalization (less overfitting) at the expense of slightly costlier training and inference. The memory constraints on Tesla Dojo might not be a big deal after all.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#87

Post by dragontamer »

stcredzero wrote: post #74
vishnugupta wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build a completely different device that solves the same problem I realised this while discussing self-driving cars with my friends. I used example of Uber Eats. The problem statement is "I don't want to cook" and a reasonably acceptable solution IMO is cloud kitchens + delivery. As opposed to building a cooking robot. Cloud kitchens could automate 80% of repeatable stuff because it makes sense to solve that proble…

Why not optimize Blue Apron and HelloFresh style meal kits so that they involve even less labor, then distribute the production to local commercial kitchens? There are already businesses that package this kind of prep work for restaurants.

I'm pretty sure you're just reinventing Domino's pasta line.

Standardize the ovens you distribute around the world. Simplify food cooking so that its just "put this pre-cut prepared block of aluminum foil into the standard-temperature oven for 15 minutes", and "deliver".

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#88

Post by rini17 »

samstave wrote: post #83
rini17 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large part of TCP is dealing with dropped packets. Presumably you don't want that to carry that over to rail/road traffic :)

HAHAH yes, I know -- I just didnt have a better example protocol... TCP is "ensuring the traffic gets there" -- not so much "ensuring no collisions" that was why I chose that one. Maybe BGP instead? "Route failed - go this way instead, as a backup"

I'm pretty sure there's very active logistics R&D involved for decades already and they don't need any mansplaining about network protocols.

However if it were possible to develop completely new transportation system with autonomy considered from the planning stage, that might be more efficient. Musks' gadgets don't count, their capacity is laughable.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#89

Post by yourapostasy »

eddanger wrote: post #9
CasillasQT wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the presentation from Karpathy? Tesla goes for a general vision only end-to-end deep AI model that could in theory get rolled out everywhere on earth with enough training and a good approach for fast edge-case solving, which they showed how this can be accomplished. All the other players try to solve this with lidar and cars that cost around 500k to build and they have pretty much 0 data except for the ma…

Folks understand L1 and L5. The levels between are such a blur and mix-match of things that I don't think anything is even accomplished having these levels. I agree with you, from what I have seen Tesla is far ahead and rapidly progressing using the right approach of training NNs while having a human behind the wheel.

> ...the right approach of training NNs while having a human behind the wheel.

Can someone please help me across a conceptual bridge here?

Is there some work I'm not familiar with that shows humans use the biologically-equivalent NNs used by Tesla to accomplish L5-grade driving? I'm not talking about doing it quickly, I'm at this point interested in Tesla or anyone else for that matter demonstrating doing it at all, at any speed. It can be at an agonizingly-slow 0.25 km/hour and that would be fine.

I'm having trouble bridging between L5-the-destination and NNs-are-definitely-the-way-to-get-there. This sounds an awful lot like saying NNs-are-the-Moravec's-Paradox-solution, and I'm not sure I've read conclusively how that can be true. I can accept it as a hypothesis, but other than actually trying it out like Tesla is doing, I haven't read why it is such a strong conjecture.

It sounds from articles like [1] and [2] Tesla is only just now starting to really get into applying NNs more broadly to the problem space, and the prior years were mostly focusing on more conventional machine vision techniques and getting clean data for NNs to ingest. But I've yet to read a convincing explanation for how ML will functionally solve even the subset of Moravec's Paradox needed to accomplish L5. I grant that it will solve a facsimile of the paradox, but I feel it is arguable if it will be a reasonable facsimile. That sounds an awful lot like, "we'll brute force throw enough training data at it to reach 'reasonable facsimile' level", and I'm cautious when I hear of brute forcing as a strategy for arriving at R&D results.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/466239/tesla-migrating-to-neural-...

[2] https://electrek.co/2021/02/08/tesla-looks-hire-data-labeler...

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#90

Post by ggoo »

stcredzero wrote: post #79
ggoo wrote: post #10

Tesla's claim to delivery ratio is abysmal. I'm not sure why anybody even bothers deconstructing these presentations anymore, they're just fluff.

Tesla's claim to delivery ratio is abysmal. Can you substantiate this concretely? How about a list, with direct sources? (Not opinion pieces.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.
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