People tend to forget just how hard the edge cases in vision are!
How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun set/rain at night where it’s a total struggle to drive and you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do alright because of a ton of inference?
i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded of one of the greatest blunders is self driving history.
Pattern matching for driving is probably better, frankly. You don't have people who are stressed out, pissed off, inattentive or in a hurry doing risky stuff on the road.
The accidents caused by people with a lapse in judgement are much more memorable than the billions driving safely and preventively every day.
Current AI isn't that, but in principle it could get there.
100+ car pileups in Southern California checking in to provide a counterexample.
The patchy fog in Southern California on I-5 can go from "not too bad" to "can't see your own hood" in a matter of seconds. Radar is going to catch hazards WAY before a human will.
This leaves the question of moving to radar, but for precise resolution well ahead of the vehicle you need microwaves and a lot of power, I would guess - which reduces the vehicle's range. For all I know you might parboil passersby, too. One old Mig had a radar that would kill and roast rabbits on the runway as it took off, but that's a much different use case, of course.
No AI (reasoning) exists yet, only Machine Learning. It will take decades if not centuries.
What do you mean by "reasoning", such that there is no example of a ML system that does this?
From actual AI wiki article: “highly mathematical-statistical machine learning has dominated the field”. This will never be able to drive as good as humans.
Even if they could, a goal of self driving should be to do better than a human driver. Avoiding technology that can "see" in ways a human cannot is just short-sighted, and a huge missed opportunity.
And all that still even ignores the fact that many common environmental conditions make driving only with human eyes very unsafe. Think fog or heavy rain. A car relying only in cameras to drive in those situations will be next to useless.
Agree with your other points.
Imagine a foggy condition that causes a 50 car pile up on the highway. Which is more likely to avoid the collision, a Tesla that slowed down because it couldn't see or a Waymo/Cruise blasting down the highway at 65 mph because it's Lidar can see through the fog?
Blackmore, and Aeva can see through fog and dust that others can’t. Most sensors can see sufficiently through rain and snow.
It feels like Tesla’s main strategy is to add more data, more compute power, more simulation, and hope for “convergence”. Maybe that will work, but right now it feels like Cruise’s technology feels more mature and thought through.
As of today I can’t buy a production car with Cruise. You don’t get points for building something that’s theoretically superior but not an actual product. It’s the same story with companies like Apple that wipe the floor of wannabe hardware companies with theoretically better specs. Like Apple, Tesla actually ships.
Hilarious.
Point is I would not take anything Elon says at face value. He’s a marketer who is constantly bending the truth.
They are deploy code to cars to search for potential interesting, take lots of sample, curate and create a test and training set from that data.
Also how do you know what the Tesla compute bill is? Given their investment in GPU clusters and their own development of Dojo their cost may well have grown exponentially.
> He’s a marketer who is constantly bending the truth.
He is also a CEO of two major companies that have a good track record of achieving interesting technology and growth. So just denigrating him to a 'marketer' says more about yourself.
That asset will probably be worth far more than the self driving system.
It seems like Tesla has a huge advantage in terms of training data by leveraging a fleet of millions of vehicles.
Which is more valuable, experience or technology?
He might be right or wrong about that, but he wouldn't just ignore lidar because its currently on on the market cheaply.
I was driving down the road as normal, 4 lane divided highway that's a bit hilly. Suddenly my car starts having what I can only describe as a panic attack saying I'm running a stop sign and blaring alarms.
It was detecting a giant 40ft tall red circle sign a bit away as a stop sign...
I definitely saw a case of them overfitting their neural networks lately.
Going over a single lane bridge that's an exit ramp, the car started decoding the "other side" of the concrete barrier as oncoming traffic lanes...when there was nothing there.
Between one and two years ago, that was my perception too. But the rapid progress I've seen with Tesla FSD Beta over the past couple of years, and over the last year in particular, has forced me to change my mind. (Note: I'm talking only about Tesla's beta software. Tesla's production software is behind by dozens of versions and is without a doubt technologically inferior to Waymo and Cruise.)
Less than two years ago, I would have said FSD Beta could only deal with the "first 95%" too. Now, my perception is that FSD Beta routinely handles the first > 99% and fails only on < 1% of situations. Moreover, the failures have become more graceful -- e.g., the car will stop at intersections perceived as risky and ask the driver to confirm go-ahead by pressing the accelerator. If FSD Beta continues to improve, sooner or later it will cross the threshold at which it becomes safer than most human drivers.
That said, if I see new evidence that contradicts my perceptions, I'll change my mind again. FWIW, I'd love to see videos of Cruise and Waymo vehicles, filmed by thousands of regular consumers driving autonomously on unrestricted roads, with zero editorial input from Cruise or Waymo.
Different approaches lead to different paths to solutions, I am not convinced that either will be successful and not convinces Waymo/Cruise is ahead.
Unlike those, Tesla actually makes money and uses the technology stack in more limited forms.
Do people who work in this industry actually think they've solved 95% of driving scenarios because their software can manage driving in sunny California, Nevada, and Arizona?
I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else.
Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars.
At a high level, this is why:
- The hard thing about self driving isn't the first 95%, it's the impossibly long tail of the last 5% with unique, chaotic and rare scenarios (think, a reflective citern tank with a reflection of the back of a truck transporting stop signs, or terrible weather illusions with fog).
- Doing well on the last 5% is where most of the energy from Waymo/Cruise goes (the two leaders by quite a margin).
- Tesla is camera only. Weather alone means you can't reach critical safety because of this. Cameras don't do fog well, precipitation well, or sunsets/bad lighting well (see many Tesla crashes on freeways bc of this)
- Tesla does well on the 95% and Elon is a marketing genius, with those 2 things it's easy to convince outsiders that "Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else".
My prediction: before the end of the decade, cruise and waymo have commoditized fleets doing things that most people today would find unbelievable. Tesla is still talking a big game but ultimately won't have permits for you to be in a Tesla with your hands off of the wheel.
edit: formatting and typo