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Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

arstechnica.com

91–100 of 581 posts

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#91
post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

Surely you use power steering, drive-by-wire pedals, and anti-lock breaks though, right? Or even an automatic transmission? Is it so different to use lane assist or cruise control?

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#92
post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

> Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster.

That's why I disable the anti-locking brake system and only drive a car with a manual transmission.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#93

Anyone wanna bet me that Tesla will be first to full level 5 self driving? Seems to be a lot of anti-Tesla folks here, put your money where your mouth is.

Agreed. The only company with actual autonomous driving hardware at a scale of a Million+ cars on the road right now.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD rollout is purely driven by Elon’s ego. He’s addicted to fame and power, and that comes from image he created of himself being an Iron Man. I’m pretty sure he got to a point where he believes in it, and thinks he’s invincible and can solve any problem, because he’s so much smarter than everyone. Stock bubble making wealthiest man only helped to solidify that.

I don't know, I don't get that feeling. What makes you think that? I don't know much about Elon, but I listened to one of his interviews with Rogan, and he struck me as extremely optimistic, but also grounded and not arrogant. (I do agree partial-self-driving just seems like a terrible idea. I guess crash stats can reveal if this is true or not, but are perhaps not available.)

his covid comments last year were beyond the pale. The low point for me was when Shannon Woodward, who played a scientist on TV and to my knowledge isn't one, had to explain to him that tests are indeed not a big pharma conspiracy

https://twitter.com/shannonwoodward/status/13275176940992757...

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#95
post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

You can see in all public talks how Karpathy focuses almost exclusively on image recognition. Yeah, that’s great and important, but that’s a step one in making any autonomous vehicle. And the easiest one.

He's also spoken at length about deriving point clouds from images alone at the Teslas autonomy day for investors.

Can't expect a commercial company operating at the bleeding edge to host a "IP giveaway" day as researchers do.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#96
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. I did a fairly deep dive into what path the car industry is going to take with respect to electric cars (especially what a mass market electric car is going to look like), and it all had a huge asterisk associated with it of "but mass car ownership might stop being a thing before any of this happens", at which point thing change drasticly, because then you have a much smaller market of probably more sp…

I should probably dig a little more into the microeconomics, but for me as a consumer the only difference between an autonomous car and an (human) Uber is price. If we assume that the price of the car stays the same, insurance and fuel still have to be paid and the cab app gets their cut - how much of my ride is really attributable to the cost of the human driver? So how much human labor can be automated away to the…

Significantly more than half of your ride fare on Uber goes to the driver - between 70 and 130%. Human costs are vastly the most expensive part of hailing a ride, and will remain so as long as minimum wage exists.

The same argument for human drivers also applies to human dishwashers and human launderers, and yet, most of us are fine using machines for this purpose. Whether or not this will cause financial disaster for people relying on it for a source of income is irrelevant when replacing jobs with technology.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#97
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will die. It will also save lives. It’s probably already prevented thousands of accidents, some of which would have been fatal. It just doesn’t make national news when your car moves you out of the way of danger.

I am not so sure about this. Modern cars come with a lot of safety features, like automatic braking and adaptive cruise control. Sure, if you replace all 1995 Honda Civics with Teslas, you will save many lives. I don't think you could save any lives by replacing all modern 2020 cars from other manufacturers with Teslas.

All of the systems in other vehicles have the same pitfalls as any driver-assistance system and have the same driver behavior risks as Tesla's system.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#98
post #92
post #35

I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked. Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving. I completely agree wit…

> Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster. That's why I disable the anti-locking brake system and only drive a car with a manual transmission.

I only fly in aircraft built more than twenty years ago, avoiding any fly-by-wire death traps.

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In poorer nations autonomous cars could take much longer for mass adoption due to different, sometimes harsher road conditions, and lack of reliable road-map data. In addition, self-driving vehicles would be pricier. For a poor nation, that price tag might be higher than human labor.

yes, making autonomous driving work in central Delhi or Agadir will be much different from a US highway. Maybe it's too cyberpunk, but I can already see the headline of road pirates capturing autonomous cars and taking them apart for spares. Those sensors, the GPU and computing units are quite valuable.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo CEO dismisses Tesla self-driving plan: “This is not how it works”

#100
post #26

I think the FSD beta rollout is completely irresponsible from Tesla. Rolling out a clearly half-baked safety critical technology to its customers (yes, I know it's only a few beta testers) who are untrained is nothing but a tactic to generate hype and get more customers to buy that $10k FSD package. This is on top of Tesla being the least transparent company out there in reporting safety data or their testing methodo…

FSD rollout is purely driven by Elon’s ego. He’s addicted to fame and power, and that comes from image he created of himself being an Iron Man. I’m pretty sure he got to a point where he believes in it, and thinks he’s invincible and can solve any problem, because he’s so much smarter than everyone. Stock bubble making wealthiest man only helped to solidify that.

He didn't create that image on his own. He had a lot of help. He had a cameo in Iron Man 2 where Iron Man treated him as a peer!

(That scene, by the way, is a perfect example of why I hate superhero movies.)

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