"Less sensors can be more safe/effective if that allows us to focus on making effective use of the sensor information we do have, which is the result we're aiming for with this descision." would be a reasonable answer (if true), but that doesn't seem like a fair interpretation of what he actually said.
“Organizationally it can be very distracting. If all you want to get to work is vision resources are on it and you’re actually making forward progress. That is the sensor with the most bandwidth the most constraints and you’re investing fully into that and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the system.”
Which was from this section: Q: “Is it more bloat in the data engine?”
“100%” (Q:“is it a distraction?”) “These sensors can change over time.” “Suddenly you need to worry about it. And they will have different distributions. They contribute noise and entropy into everything and they bloat stuff”.
Even earlier he says:
“These sensors aren’t free…” list of reasons including “you have to fuse them into the system in some way. So that like bloats the organization” “The cost is high and you’re not particularly seeing it if your just a computer vision engineer and I am just trying to improve my network.”
I listened to his answer three times and I’m not able to come up with a different interpretation than that.
Andrej eventually gets to it. But his first response was to evade. Lex is a skilled interviewer. By not letting him wriggle out of a difficult question we eventually got a substantive answer. But Andrej's first instinct was to evade. That's notable.
Otherwise I agree.
Fair enough. Seemingly practiced may be a better description. (I'm not super familiar with his work.)
This is what doesn't add up to me. Either a lot of that previous wonder-talk was actually a lie, or there's something else going on here.
Tesla dropped radar and ultrasonic due to supply shortages. Nothing to do with their AI being smart.
Many first-hand reports on Tesla fanboy forums on how no-radar and no-ultrasonic autopilot is far worse than with the sensors.
The sensors are unreliable and expensive in terms of R&D. Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. “They contribute noise and entropy into everything.”
His standpoint can be summed up as “I think some of the other companies are going to drop it.” Which would be really interesting if true.