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I'll just be upfront, I'm a total pessimist on the near-term possibility of autonomous driving. >I don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Why?

I'll just be upfront, I'm a total pessimist on the near-term possibility of autonomous driving. >I don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Why? AI winter is a well-known phenomenon, AI hype has permeated tech, now business and is starting to push into the layman's consciousness. Does it not seem that a bust is near? The laymans perception of autonomous driving is a magic box that will drive them around while they read their phones and that it will be here in 5/10 years. I think that's just unsustainable. A car which can handle northern snow, midwestern winds, country potholes, city traffic, unpredictiable/aggressive drivers and which can do that with a lower accident rate than humans is our generations cold fusion. Fundamental breakthroughs are needed. What strikes me is that we think because we can describe "driving" in one word, we think it is a specific task, but it seems much more general and AI developments on general learning are notoriously fraught. Your thoughts?

Fricken 10y ago
I don't know what people mean when they say 'the near-term possibility of autonomous driving'. Some people mean a car that can go everywhere and do everything a human can. I'm thinking about robotaxis in the Bay area that drive along established circuits and do pick-ups and drop offs in designated zones like bus stops. That's what I'm expecting to see in the 5 year time frame, and being able to apply autonomous driving technology to that limited extent opens a very lucrative new market. Any way you look at the autonomous driving problem it's a hard problem, but every few days it seems there's some paper coming out that demos a new optimization to one aspect or another of the autonomous vehicle development pipeline. The world of modular deep learning systems, where you have various parent and child subsystems that can be quickly trained and swapped out is very much an open and field of research and my bet is on agile teams that can build and test models faster, and can take things from research to implementation in less time than the competition. Drive.ai's best trade secret is the system they have for vastly reducing the amount of training data they need to get a result, and vastly reducing the amount of human labour needed to annotate or clean up said training data. I don't know what the hype is. People are expecting terminator robots or something, that's not going to happen anytime soon. But progress in Machine learning has been steady and driving for a decade and shows know signs of letting up in the forseeable future, because we just keep opening up new frontiers to explore. There's so much to do.
- baq 10y ago
  I expect a car that can get me to and from work safely and reliably so i don't have to waste an hour a day driving - and i hear i'm lucky that it's only an hour.
greenshackle2 10y ago
I take it you've shorted AI companies then?
nl 10y ago
There is no doubt that AI (like all technologies) will hit the "trough of disillusionment". But that is different to another AI winter. AI is making real companies real money this time.

Fricken 10y ago

I don't know what people mean when they say 'the near-term possibility of autonomous driving'. Some people mean a car that can go everywhere and do everything a human can. I'm thinking about robotaxis in the Bay area that drive along established circuits and do pick-ups and drop offs in designated zones like bus stops. That's what I'm expecting to see in the 5 year time frame, and being able to apply autonomous driving technology to that limited extent opens a very lucrative new market. Any way you look at the autonomous driving problem it's a hard problem, but every few days it seems there's some paper coming out that demos a new optimization to one aspect or another of the autonomous vehicle development pipeline. The world of modular deep learning systems, where you have various parent and child subsystems that can be quickly trained and swapped out is very much an open and field of research and my bet is on agile teams that can build and test models faster, and can take things from research to implementation in less time than the competition. Drive.ai's best trade secret is the system they have for vastly reducing the amount of training data they need to get a result, and vastly reducing the amount of human labour needed to annotate or clean up said training data. I don't know what the hype is. People are expecting terminator robots or something, that's not going to happen anytime soon. But progress in Machine learning has been steady and driving for a decade and shows know signs of letting up in the forseeable future, because we just keep opening up new frontiers to explore. There's so much to do.

baq 10y ago
I expect a car that can get me to and from work safely and reliably so i don't have to waste an hour a day driving - and i hear i'm lucky that it's only an hour.

greenshackle2 10y ago

I take it you've shorted AI companies then?

nl 10y ago

There is no doubt that AI (like all technologies) will hit the "trough of disillusionment". But that is different to another AI winter. AI is making real companies real money this time.