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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

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Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#81
Cruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the US.

They have had several tenders for the data required to build out the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear the critical knowledge is gone.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#82
post #35

I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense wh…

> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume…

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Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#83

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

This interview with MobileEye: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-... says they're going to release hardware for level 4 autonomy by 2024 or 2025.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#84
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget, Tesla uses cheap 1280x960 cameras (citation needed - they may have upgraded)... pointing out a potentially dirty windshield.

Not sure about the resolution, but the sensor is rather large. Resolution isn't nearly as important as being able to see clearly in low light. Re: dirty windshield. Humans see through those, and we have windshield wipers if visibility is impeded. I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job.

> I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job.

Not for Tesla. So many interventions. So many situations where the car actively tries to kill the driver and pedestrians.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#85
post #78

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the k…

How much of that camera data is labeled for distance measurement use cases?

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#86
post #66
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? On some benchmarks, AI models are better at very well defined tasks like image classification (“label this image from a set of 8 labels you’ve seen before”) or object detection (“draw a box around all instances of class X in this image, where X is a very narrowly defined class”) They’re not even close to being able to understand unscene examples and…

In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be some extra input data to the ML model.

LIDAR data contains highly accurate depth information, at which point you don't need the abstract reasoning nearly so much. You can at least do basic object tracking and collision prevention without it.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#87
post #72
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I…

That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just because a human is at the wheel.

I don't think that was the parent's point. These things could be made safer with other detection technologies beyond plain cameras. A human driver can make a conscious, nuanced decision to make these "faith-based decisions", but a computer may not be able to. So perhaps it might just completely refuse to drive in those situations if all it has is a camera, but it can't see anything due to fog or terrain, even if it would be somewhat safe for a human to drive in that situation.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#88
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a word for engineers that program cars to break the law resulting in deaths, and one of the first law codes specifies the appropriate punishment. Tesla is not operating in a way any ethical engineer should tolerate.

GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900 million to the United States government in 2014 [1]. Tesla's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2]. Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…

Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#89

Huge fan of Kyle and the Cruise team. I remember covering Cruise in a class assignment back in 2014, and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners. Ever since, they've gotten acquired (or something) and are holding up their own against behemoths in the space. Cruise's reviews on Blind are pretty bad, something that keeps me away from joining them as an employee, but I suppose…

> and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners The good thing is we have comma.ai that works across a wide variety of vehicles.

I am not as familiar with comma's product, but in 2014, self driving tech was out there enough as an idea for startups to invest in (ie Google moonshot level dreamy), let alone build kits that would retrofit into existing cars and actually work. Thanks for sharing about comma.ai!

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#90
post #29

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).

There are certain tasks where the models can do better than certain kinds of human effort (e.g. can do better than a person who is tired from doing a thousand of these in a row, is paying very little attention, is spending very little time, and doesn't really care), but that hasn't translated into actually doing image recognition better than humans.
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