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GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

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Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#81

Post by Waterluvian »

LegitShady wrote: post #80
Waterluvian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we don’t know yet. Maybe in the future!

But Tesla or anyone else pulling radar stuff doesn’t really suggest he’s right. Until any of them succeed, it doesn’t mean much.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#82

Post by D13Fd »

joshe wrote: post #59
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about machine learning is that it can fail very suddenly, in a very unhuman way. So even if self driving works most of the time, it takes a lot of work to address weird edge cases even the most inebriated human would not mess up, that other drivers/pedestrians would not anticipate.

Nah, it's failure mode is to slow down and pull over. It would be amazing if drunk humans did the same.

Or, you know, happily run you right into a tractor trailor or highway divider.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#83

Post by LegitShady »

Waterluvian wrote: post #81
LegitShady wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we don’t know yet. Maybe in the future! But Tesla or anyone else pulling radar stuff doesn’t really suggest he’s right. Until any of them succeed, it doesn’t mean much.

To some degree it is an expert opinion. Opinions can change or be wrong but they still have some noteworthiness

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#84

Post by maximus-decimus »

zug_zug wrote: post #79
andrewmutz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because they don't make laws just for you, they make laws for everybody including the drunk 16 inexperience texters and the new parents who survive on 3 hours of sleeps.

And those people drive on the same roads as you, so you're still affected. Don't you want other drivers on the road to be less likely to t-bone you because they ran a red light?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#85

Post by fragmede »

unclad5968 wrote: post #26
jessriedel wrote: post #14

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.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

How else would you do it? First, get the technology to work at all before doing the harder things it can't handle yet. Crawl, walk, then run. Or in this case, drive in snow. Even if it never gets there in my lifetime (which I doubt), it's already working.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#86

Post by foooorsyth »

jessriedel wrote: post #74
foooorsyth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs

Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious.

Waymo is expanding -- their service areas (and operating times) have expanded in SF and Phoenix. There's a waitlist in LA and Austin. Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023.

You think Google, which has been catching heat endlessly for falling behind in AI, has not only won the self-driving race from a technical standpoint (the claim by many in this thread), but has also found a way to make it both profitable and scalable to arbitrary locations, and they're hiding this reality in their earnings statements? Seems unlikely to me. Why bother with waitlists and slow rollouts in favorable climates? Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#87

Post by fragmede »

ramesh31 wrote: post #35
lorstic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vision-only is very very very far behind other techniques. Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF. Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity. Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of m…

Vision-only is stupid. I can't see through fog and have a tough time with glare and can't see in the dark. Other technologies aren't subject to the same limitations. Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#88

Post by lopkeny12ko »

fragmede wrote: post #87
ramesh31 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cruise (the self driving company, not OP) was killed by an overzealous CEO, not by their chosen technique. Waymo drives great in SF. Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity. Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of m…

Vision-only is stupid. I can't see through fog and have a tough time with glare and can't see in the dark. Other technologies aren't subject to the same limitations. Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?

You say vision-only is stupid, but Tesla FSD is the only full self-driving system deployed to millions of drivers and usable anywhere in the world, right now, at scale.

> Don't we want these things to be better at driving than humans?

Sure we do. Your options are, a as-good-as-a-human-driver for 1 unit of cost, or a better-than-human-driver at 1000 units of cost. Realistically, which do you pick?

Other tech like Waymo is good. They drive well. But it's not scalable--expensive mapping and hundreds of thousands of lines of code written to address the nuances of whatever city they specialize the solution to. Not to mention that they only operate in cities with sunny weather all year round!

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#89

Post by chris-orgmenta »

thot_experiment wrote: post #28

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…

I am on the side of cars (long term), even though I hate cars, the inefficiency, the space issues, the anti-pedestrian externalities, etc.

Ultimately, to design a transport system that benefits all of society, it needs to go from point A to point B. Light rail / public transport will always need a +somethingelse, in order to do that. Or we end up expanding the rail infra so much that we have just reinvented roads, but a little more constrained. Or we end up with car shares. Either way is fine.

I just don't see how to cater for lots of different disabilities and needs without 'cars' being a (maybe small) part of it. Regardless of what path we take, I just see the evolution converging back on a car-like vehicle for a substantial portion of the freight/transport industry (albeit 'trains' of them, but not physically connected), even if it's mostly final mile. But people and things don't want to hop between transport modes. They want to step outside their door into a vehicle, then out again at the destination.

Anyway... Self driving vehicles could be worse than some drivers currently, but it sure is better than SOME drivers I have seen. For an industry that has only had 15yrs direct investment, it's already better than bad drivers from my view - So it's almost time to start making driving licenses slightly harder to get and keep, IMO (it's so easy to get a license. It's hard to take them away, unless it's after an incident. There are so many very unsafe drivers).

That's a long way of saying that I concur with your comment.

Re: GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise

#90

Post by SR2Z »

gibolt wrote: post #46
adrr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.

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.

It revealed that a human operator engages with the car in some way every 4-5 miles, and the (ex) CEO explained that this metric was stupid because human operators were always fully assigned.

His suggested metric is cars/operator, which was ~20 IIRC.

For Tesla, for the near future, that number is 1.

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