8 ms·

Tesla deploys massive new Autopilot neural net in v9

125 points by skuzins 8y ago

desireco42 8y ago
This is the blog/site, where editor got Tesla Roadster through affiliate points. So, take it into account when you read articles about otherwise fantastic Tesla cars.
- astrowilliam 8y ago
  Good on them for working hard to get affiliate points for a brand new Tesla. It took them working their butts off to get one. I found the article to be full of unbiased information and also more personal info in the "ELECTREK’S TAKE" section.
  - Kozoxy 8y ago
    Good on you that you found value in the article, but I found it to be biased in favor of Tesla, and also find it sleazy that they didn't disclose their affiliation to Tesla.
    - mgiannopoulos 8y ago
      Their participation in the affiliate scheme is very often mentioned in the articles.
      - FireBeyond 8y ago
        But certainly not in this one.
        Latteland 8y ago
        Every Tesla owner is in the referral program. If you get something like 20 referrals at various times you could get a car. These guys own a Tesla, I think two of them between them, and so could eventually earn a car. Even I am a craven person who get something if you use my referral code to buy a tesla. You get $100 a year for at least 4 years in supercharger credits (that's like $400 a year in a regular gas car cause EVs get the equivalent of around 100 miles a gallon in gas :-)). I get virtually nothing unless I get 20 of them - not sure of the current program but so far my life time total referrals is: 0. If you have questions and want to ask someone who has owned two different ones since 2012 ask me questions. If you want to buy a tesla, I have a referral link too, contact me via email on my account here, maybe hackernews wouldn't like me to just put it out here.
    - woodandsteel 8y ago
      >I found it to be biased in favor of Tesla When someone makes a broad critical remark about an article, but provides no specifics, I tend to assume it is because they know the article was in fact accurate, but don't want to admit it.
Kozoxy 8y ago
That's great, but when are they going to properly address and mitigate the potentially massively lethal cyber- and national-security issues made possible by the tech? Or do we have to talk only about what they want us to talk?
- koiz 8y ago
  Everything has potential to cause issues, won't stop progress. Let's not act like they are ignoring this.
  - Kozoxy 8y ago
    Everything has potential to cause issues, and that's not reason to dismiss life or death concerns. What are they doing about it that's effective? They are ignoring this.
    - koiz 8y ago
      No one is dismissing life or death concerns they are dismissing your comments.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    Do users have the ability to stop updates without repercussions? Is it really a choice that cannot be overridden by the update? If X declares war on California, will California shutdown every Tesla in X? Will I be allowed to export my Tesla in 15 years to whatever developing country I like?
    - Kozoxy 8y ago
      Will my car be taken over and kill me? Will other people's cars be taken over and kill me? Will my car be taken over and be used to drive me to someone who will harm me? These are life or death concerns and let's not act like they're not ignoring this.
      - 8y ago
Ajedi32 8y ago
The original forum post this article is about has better info IMO: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/neural-networks.101416/page-26#post-3120699 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/neural-networks.1014...
- synaesthesisx 8y ago
  Whoa back up - he claims it was built off Inception V1? Truly impressive if that's the case...
  - nkoren 8y ago
    Care to expand on that?
    - CarVac 8y ago
      Right from the end of that forum post: >Inception V1 is a four year old architecture that Tesla is scaling to a degree that I imagine inceptions’s creators could not have expected. Indeed, I would guess that four years ago most people in the field would not have expected that scaling would work this well. Scaling computational power, training data, and industrial resources plays to Tesla’s strengths and involves less uncertainty than potentially more powerful but less mature techniques.
Someone 8y ago
”When you increase the number of parameters (weights) in an NN by a factor of 5 you don’t just get 5 times the capacity and need 5 times as much training data. In terms of expressive capacity increase it’s more akin to a number with 5 times as many digits. So if V8’s expressive capacity was 10, V9’s capacity is more like 100,000.” I find it very, very hard to believe that. I know ‘expressive power’ is a fairly vague concept, but if things scale that well, there must be papers out there that at least hint at such (IMHO) insane scaling laws. I think it also must mean that it is fairly easy for those with huge budgets to build a system that’s way better, except for the fact that it is too slow or takes too much power (just as 3D graphics in movies show what will be on our desks/phones in a decade or two) I’ve asked it before, but does anybody know of papers that describe an offline self-driving system that’s as good as perfect?
- loser777 8y ago
  It seems that there is stronger evidence that model architecture is more important than sheer number of parameters/computational complexity. Compare VGG-16 with something like MobileNet or ResNet-18.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  Here is a highly specific definition of "expressive power" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC_dimension https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC_dimension To me the statement doesn't seem that unreasonable
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    Thanks for bringing this to my attenton. In that article, however, it says for neural nets: V is the set of nodes. Each node is a simple computation cell. E is the set of edges, Each edge has a weight. .... If the activation function is the sigmoid function and the weights are general, then the VC dimension is ... at most O(|E|^2.|V|^2) [apologies for the crappy formatting] While Someone's quote from the article seems to be suggesting something exponential in the number of edges.
    - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 8y ago
Still completely reckless in my opinion to deploy any autonomous system without LIDAR or some other long range, night time capable sensor. Even if it's not reckless their competitors will offer low light and night time autonomous driving which will be a major advantage.
- xvector 8y ago
  I do not get why your comment is so controversial - you are absolutely right. Conventional cameras alone are not trustworthy for self-driving, and this is part of the reason every respectable company venturing into self-driving is incorporation technologies like LIDAR. I find it sketchy that Tesla markets "future full-self-driving" when they are unlikely to have the hardware to make that a safe experience.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I think it's important to recognize that Tesla is (partially) a technology deflation play (its also a financial engineering play, but that is out of scope for this thread). Their ability to deliver is a function of the costs of their basic technology supplies (batteries for the Roadster were expensive, less so for the S, X, and energy storage, and now even less so for the 3). This is very similar to the cost decline curve of solar, wind, and storage in the utility energy space (project developers provide bids based on where prices will be in 3-5 years). Tesla can do this because technology and batteries rapidly decreases in cost every year. Need new autopilot compute hardware? It should be cheaper by the time they need to perform the swap to realize the capability. Need LIDAR? They'll find a way to install it, and the costs should be fairly reasonable per vehicle instead of thousands, or tens of thousands, if they went all in when it was expensive. This is not unlike a technology startup, where technical debt you're going to pay off in the future is an acceptable tradeoff, so you push off the decision and/or work until the last possible moment (but no further).
    - threeseed 8y ago
      ALL of the other OEMs are building autonomous cars using LIDAR so cost isn't a factor. And relating it to technical debt makes no sense as you have to design with LIDAR in the beginning.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
I wish that articles like this would make it clear which features apply to which cars. It would be nice to know if there are any improvements to cars with Autopilot version 1 for instance.
Jemm 8y ago
Not a single pedestrian in the whole video.

125 points by skuzins 8y ago

This is the blog/site, where editor got Tesla Roadster through affiliate points. So, take it into account when you read articles about otherwise fantastic Tesla cars.

astrowilliam 8y ago
Good on them for working hard to get affiliate points for a brand new Tesla. It took them working their butts off to get one. I found the article to be full of unbiased information and also more personal info in the "ELECTREK’S TAKE" section.
- Kozoxy 8y ago
  Good on you that you found value in the article, but I found it to be biased in favor of Tesla, and also find it sleazy that they didn't disclose their affiliation to Tesla.
  - mgiannopoulos 8y ago
    Their participation in the affiliate scheme is very often mentioned in the articles.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      But certainly not in this one.
      - Latteland 8y ago
        Every Tesla owner is in the referral program. If you get something like 20 referrals at various times you could get a car. These guys own a Tesla, I think two of them between them, and so could eventually earn a car. Even I am a craven person who get something if you use my referral code to buy a tesla. You get $100 a year for at least 4 years in supercharger credits (that's like $400 a year in a regular gas car cause EVs get the equivalent of around 100 miles a gallon in gas :-)). I get virtually nothing unless I get 20 of them - not sure of the current program but so far my life time total referrals is: 0. If you have questions and want to ask someone who has owned two different ones since 2012 ask me questions. If you want to buy a tesla, I have a referral link too, contact me via email on my account here, maybe hackernews wouldn't like me to just put it out here.
  - woodandsteel 8y ago
    >I found it to be biased in favor of Tesla When someone makes a broad critical remark about an article, but provides no specifics, I tend to assume it is because they know the article was in fact accurate, but don't want to admit it.

Kozoxy 8y ago

That's great, but when are they going to properly address and mitigate the potentially massively lethal cyber- and national-security issues made possible by the tech? Or do we have to talk only about what they want us to talk?

koiz 8y ago
Everything has potential to cause issues, won't stop progress. Let's not act like they are ignoring this.
- Kozoxy 8y ago
  Everything has potential to cause issues, and that's not reason to dismiss life or death concerns. What are they doing about it that's effective? They are ignoring this.
  - koiz 8y ago
    No one is dismissing life or death concerns they are dismissing your comments.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  Do users have the ability to stop updates without repercussions? Is it really a choice that cannot be overridden by the update? If X declares war on California, will California shutdown every Tesla in X? Will I be allowed to export my Tesla in 15 years to whatever developing country I like?
  - Kozoxy 8y ago
    Will my car be taken over and kill me? Will other people's cars be taken over and kill me? Will my car be taken over and be used to drive me to someone who will harm me? These are life or death concerns and let's not act like they're not ignoring this.
    - 8y ago

Ajedi32 8y ago

The original forum post this article is about has better info IMO: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/neural-networks.101416/page-26#post-3120699 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/neural-networks.1014...

synaesthesisx 8y ago
Whoa back up - he claims it was built off Inception V1? Truly impressive if that's the case...
- nkoren 8y ago
  Care to expand on that?
  - CarVac 8y ago
    Right from the end of that forum post: >Inception V1 is a four year old architecture that Tesla is scaling to a degree that I imagine inceptions’s creators could not have expected. Indeed, I would guess that four years ago most people in the field would not have expected that scaling would work this well. Scaling computational power, training data, and industrial resources plays to Tesla’s strengths and involves less uncertainty than potentially more powerful but less mature techniques.

Someone 8y ago

”When you increase the number of parameters (weights) in an NN by a factor of 5 you don’t just get 5 times the capacity and need 5 times as much training data. In terms of expressive capacity increase it’s more akin to a number with 5 times as many digits. So if V8’s expressive capacity was 10, V9’s capacity is more like 100,000.” I find it very, very hard to believe that. I know ‘expressive power’ is a fairly vague concept, but if things scale that well, there must be papers out there that at least hint at such (IMHO) insane scaling laws. I think it also must mean that it is fairly easy for those with huge budgets to build a system that’s way better, except for the fact that it is too slow or takes too much power (just as 3D graphics in movies show what will be on our desks/phones in a decade or two) I’ve asked it before, but does anybody know of papers that describe an offline self-driving system that’s as good as perfect?

loser777 8y ago
It seems that there is stronger evidence that model architecture is more important than sheer number of parameters/computational complexity. Compare VGG-16 with something like MobileNet or ResNet-18.
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
Here is a highly specific definition of "expressive power" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC_dimension https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC_dimension To me the statement doesn't seem that unreasonable
- mannykannot 8y ago
  Thanks for bringing this to my attenton. In that article, however, it says for neural nets: V is the set of nodes. Each node is a simple computation cell. E is the set of edges, Each edge has a weight. .... If the activation function is the sigmoid function and the weights are general, then the VC dimension is ... at most O(|E|^2.|V|^2) [apologies for the crappy formatting] While Someone's quote from the article seems to be suggesting something exponential in the number of edges.
  - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 8y ago

Still completely reckless in my opinion to deploy any autonomous system without LIDAR or some other long range, night time capable sensor. Even if it's not reckless their competitors will offer low light and night time autonomous driving which will be a major advantage.

xvector 8y ago
I do not get why your comment is so controversial - you are absolutely right. Conventional cameras alone are not trustworthy for self-driving, and this is part of the reason every respectable company venturing into self-driving is incorporation technologies like LIDAR. I find it sketchy that Tesla markets "future full-self-driving" when they are unlikely to have the hardware to make that a safe experience.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I think it's important to recognize that Tesla is (partially) a technology deflation play (its also a financial engineering play, but that is out of scope for this thread). Their ability to deliver is a function of the costs of their basic technology supplies (batteries for the Roadster were expensive, less so for the S, X, and energy storage, and now even less so for the 3). This is very similar to the cost decline curve of solar, wind, and storage in the utility energy space (project developers provide bids based on where prices will be in 3-5 years). Tesla can do this because technology and batteries rapidly decreases in cost every year. Need new autopilot compute hardware? It should be cheaper by the time they need to perform the swap to realize the capability. Need LIDAR? They'll find a way to install it, and the costs should be fairly reasonable per vehicle instead of thousands, or tens of thousands, if they went all in when it was expensive. This is not unlike a technology startup, where technical debt you're going to pay off in the future is an acceptable tradeoff, so you push off the decision and/or work until the last possible moment (but no further).
  - threeseed 8y ago
    ALL of the other OEMs are building autonomous cars using LIDAR so cost isn't a factor. And relating it to technical debt makes no sense as you have to design with LIDAR in the beginning.

kwhitefoot 8y ago

I wish that articles like this would make it clear which features apply to which cars. It would be nice to know if there are any improvements to cars with Autopilot version 1 for instance.

Jemm 8y ago

Not a single pedestrian in the whole video.