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I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

Fricken 9y ago
Last week Tesla began collecting short sections of video data from those with their new in-house Autopilot hardware. So really, Tesla's just getting started, and they're doing it with underpowered sensors and compute. https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-update-video-data-speed-restriction-lifted https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-u... Waymo was ahead of where Tesla is now back in 2012. In a demonstration capacity, Waymo's cars were working 5 years ago, but in the intermittent time Waymo has been validating their software against every possible edge case they might encounter on a real world situation, and Tesla will have to do the same one way or another before their autonomous OS can operate safely without a babysitter.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It is a matter of point of view, how many waymo car have been sold to customers ? how many waymo cars are out of the waymo car factories every months ? There are several things to tackle and different approaches to things, the DARPA grand challenge is the practical one and waymo did not took part in any edition AFAIK.
  - Zarel 9y ago
    From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    How many people have died in Waymo cars?
kyrra 9y ago
It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day). Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0]. So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research. [0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-collecting-video-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...
- taneq 9y ago
  They may not be sending data back home via the mobile network, but you can bet your boots they make exhaustive logs of Autopilot disengagements and store them locally to be siphoned off at the next service. I wonder if they have WiFi base stations collecting data at Supercharger points? That's what I'd do.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Why not use owner's home network?
    - remus 9y ago
      The logs might be pretty big, so it might have a significant impact on people on metered internet connections.
      - drcross 9y ago
        Not if it's only greyscale camera data and some point cloud data which is heavily compressible.
        nolok 9y ago
        But then you're back to square one : that data is much less detailed than what waymo gets.
ma2rten 9y ago
As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gbsec http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  You shouldn't need to upload the entire 1gb. The central AI can query the cars to get just the bits it has questions about. Part of the AI's job is learning which data to care about and which data to ignore. The fact that the trees got new leaves again this year and it's dark at 2am and the sign at the Chinese Restaurant is still red don't to be relayed. More data isn't automatically better. The hard part isn't getting some magical quantity of data the hard part is asking the right questions of it. A self driving system needs to solve this problem (the frame problem) anyway. So you get intelligence compression for "free". In a sense, intelligence is compression.
  - cycrutchfield 9y ago
    You have essentially just described distributed learning. Only transmit the gradients back to the central server, not the data.
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      That'd be one way of doing it. You could also just send the cars experimental queries to upload, and still do the leaning centrally.
  - solipsism 9y ago
    This is naive. You don't know what data you will care about in a year. The ability to have and keep all the data is incredibly valuable.
    - 9y ago
yalogin 9y ago
Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.
tribby 9y ago
teslas don't have lidar, so it's hard to say how useful their data will be in the long term
- fleetingmoments 9y ago
  True, but if it turns out LIDAR is overkill and that self-driving can be done with only cheaper sensors (cameras), Waymo might be behind the curve on the use-case that the market will opt for.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    When it comes to your safety, would you rather overkill or underkill? Especially when it comes to something as important as self-driving, I think it's absolutely reckless to try to "maximize profit" and "get it out there ASAP". It would be an absolutely disaster if the technology as a whole gets a horrible reputation, or even worse, banned in places, just because some company skipped some steps and wanted to be the first or cheapest to the market.
CydeWeys 9y ago
The miles aren't equal, though. Waymo's cars have an amazing array of sensors on them, including 360 degree LiDAR, which Teslas don't have.
amyjess 9y ago
I'm sure that Google gathers so much data from human drivers using Google Maps and Waze that they can build a decent model.
- komali2 9y ago
  Why do you think Google maps data would be as useful as the camera and steering input data Tesla can collect?
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    Why do you think Tesla is able to collect all or any of the camera and steering input data? And what proof do you have that the little they are able to get off is actually at all valuable.
    - komali2 9y ago
      Ok, fine, we don't know what either company is collecting, but google maps can ONLY collect GPS and speed data, whereas Tesla has the POTENTIAL to collect gps, speed, camera, steering input, braking input, and acceleration input.

Fricken 9y ago

Last week Tesla began collecting short sections of video data from those with their new in-house Autopilot hardware. So really, Tesla's just getting started, and they're doing it with underpowered sensors and compute. https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-update-video-data-speed-restriction-lifted https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-u... Waymo was ahead of where Tesla is now back in 2012. In a demonstration capacity, Waymo's cars were working 5 years ago, but in the intermittent time Waymo has been validating their software against every possible edge case they might encounter on a real world situation, and Tesla will have to do the same one way or another before their autonomous OS can operate safely without a babysitter.

bigbugbag 9y ago
It is a matter of point of view, how many waymo car have been sold to customers ? how many waymo cars are out of the waymo car factories every months ? There are several things to tackle and different approaches to things, the DARPA grand challenge is the practical one and waymo did not took part in any edition AFAIK.
- Zarel 9y ago
  From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  How many people have died in Waymo cars?

kyrra 9y ago

It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day). Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0]. So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research. [0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-collecting-video-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...

taneq 9y ago
They may not be sending data back home via the mobile network, but you can bet your boots they make exhaustive logs of Autopilot disengagements and store them locally to be siphoned off at the next service. I wonder if they have WiFi base stations collecting data at Supercharger points? That's what I'd do.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Why not use owner's home network?
  - remus 9y ago
    The logs might be pretty big, so it might have a significant impact on people on metered internet connections.
    - drcross 9y ago
      Not if it's only greyscale camera data and some point cloud data which is heavily compressible.
      - nolok 9y ago
        But then you're back to square one : that data is much less detailed than what waymo gets.

ma2rten 9y ago

As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gbsec http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...

erikpukinskis 9y ago
You shouldn't need to upload the entire 1gb. The central AI can query the cars to get just the bits it has questions about. Part of the AI's job is learning which data to care about and which data to ignore. The fact that the trees got new leaves again this year and it's dark at 2am and the sign at the Chinese Restaurant is still red don't to be relayed. More data isn't automatically better. The hard part isn't getting some magical quantity of data the hard part is asking the right questions of it. A self driving system needs to solve this problem (the frame problem) anyway. So you get intelligence compression for "free". In a sense, intelligence is compression.
- cycrutchfield 9y ago
  You have essentially just described distributed learning. Only transmit the gradients back to the central server, not the data.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    That'd be one way of doing it. You could also just send the cars experimental queries to upload, and still do the leaning centrally.
- solipsism 9y ago
  This is naive. You don't know what data you will care about in a year. The ability to have and keep all the data is incredibly valuable.
  - 9y ago

yalogin 9y ago

Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.

tribby 9y ago

teslas don't have lidar, so it's hard to say how useful their data will be in the long term

fleetingmoments 9y ago
True, but if it turns out LIDAR is overkill and that self-driving can be done with only cheaper sensors (cameras), Waymo might be behind the curve on the use-case that the market will opt for.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  When it comes to your safety, would you rather overkill or underkill? Especially when it comes to something as important as self-driving, I think it's absolutely reckless to try to "maximize profit" and "get it out there ASAP". It would be an absolutely disaster if the technology as a whole gets a horrible reputation, or even worse, banned in places, just because some company skipped some steps and wanted to be the first or cheapest to the market.

CydeWeys 9y ago

The miles aren't equal, though. Waymo's cars have an amazing array of sensors on them, including 360 degree LiDAR, which Teslas don't have.

amyjess 9y ago

I'm sure that Google gathers so much data from human drivers using Google Maps and Waze that they can build a decent model.

komali2 9y ago
Why do you think Google maps data would be as useful as the camera and steering input data Tesla can collect?
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Why do you think Tesla is able to collect all or any of the camera and steering input data? And what proof do you have that the little they are able to get off is actually at all valuable.
  - komali2 9y ago
    Ok, fine, we don't know what either company is collecting, but google maps can ONLY collect GPS and speed data, whereas Tesla has the POTENTIAL to collect gps, speed, camera, steering input, braking input, and acceleration input.