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The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively litt
by necubi 6y ago
The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment.
The most shocking detail:
> Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-third of a mile on average.
That's really bad. While there are no uniform standards for what a "bad experience" entails, my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) are doing 10-100x better by that metric.
Another damning bit:
> Uber couldn’t even get the prototype to drive a one-mile stretch between the unit’s two Pittsburgh offices, with the goal of shuttling employees back and forth
I don't even know what to say to that. If you can't make your cars work reliably on a known, one-mile stretch of road, what have you been doing for so many years?
[Disclaimer: I work for Lyft, but not on the self-driving car program.]
- not_a_moth 6y ago> my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.
- nick0garvey 6y agoI interviewed at Cruise, and when speaking with them, Waymo was the main competitor and Tesla didn't come up.
- ummonk 6y agoNo, Tesla is nowhere near self-driving capability. Collecting a bunch of unsupervised data on its own is not that useful.
- revscat 6y agoI just drove from Dallas to southwestern Colorado and back. Of that, I estimate I drove ~15% of the entire miles driven. The rest was the car driving itself.
- ummonk 6y agoIt's not the car driving itself if you need to be constantly attentive and ready to override it.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoI just made a meal for an hour. Of that, I estimate I cooked 15 min. The rest was the oven heating itself.
- rainyMammoth 6y agoTesla is not even considered in the top half of the contenders. They are the best at hyping it up though.
- ericmay 6y agoIt blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead? I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else. It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).
- typon 6y agoYou can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.
- ericmay 6y agoI can’t drive a Waymo or Cruise car at all. So they may as well not exist. But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. And let’s make sure we are clear here, you don’t need to be on a highway to use Autopilot. Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me. Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.
- piva00 6y ago> But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. Soon as it was in 2016 [1], 2018 [2] in Feb 2019 [3], Mar 2020 [4], or July 2020 [5]? They have been hyping this up for years, why should I still believe those claims that it will soon be here™? Not only that but they have already advertised and sold "full self-driving" for people that can't use it yet, no beta, no alpha, just doesn't exist and is a paid feature. How far is this from fraud? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving-tesla-navigate-intersections-and-city-streets/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-announcements-tesla-full-self-driving-just-a-couple-of-steps-away/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-anno... [3] https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-signs/ https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-s... [4] https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-march-city-street-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-m... [5] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313
- d1zzy 6y agoI see people keep stating this but I'm not so sure about it. Do we know what critically important data Tesla cars collect at scale _and_ are able to send back to mothership and who pays for that bandwidth/traffic? To my mind most of the useful information (video recordings or pictures of moments when the AI driver wasn't sure about things and/or human intervened) seems like it would take a lot of bandwidth to send back from moving cars.
- cycrutchfield 6y agoYes, according to Karpathy. The cars upload data (typically still images) which are then labeled by humans and used as training data to improve the models.
- ethbr0 6y agoThe impression I got from GTC a few years ago was that they're probably doing synthetic graphics simulations, based on edge cases identified by real world data. You don't really need 1000x real examples of a scenario, if one still image provides enough information for you to mimic it in simulation. (E.g. toppled barrel, weathered paint color and reflective stripe, in front of exit guard rail)
- cycrutchfield 6y agoI don’t have the link, but watch Karpathy’s recent talk on this topic on YouTube. He goes into detail about how this works. I’m not sure what their approach was years ago but it has changed significantly since.
- jowday 6y agoThere's a community of reverse engineers on Twitter that have demonstrated most of Musk's claims about their data pipelines aren't true. Check out greentheonly's Twitter.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoThey're not, at least not officially - they do have the largest data sets, but they're not releasing as many features as their competitors. Whether you think they're sandbagging or behind the curve is largely a question of whether you're a fan of Tesla.
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoIndeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.
- jml7c5 6y agoFreeway driving would generally be much simpler than city driving, wouldn't it?
- ghaff 6y agoIt is. And it's a nice feature that at least the luxury car makers are iterating on. The problem is that it isn't very interesting for folks who don't want to own a car and/or want a robo-driver to take them door-to-door all the time. A real freeway autopilot feature is still a nice convenience/safety feature but you still need a licensed sober driver for the endpoints of the trip.
- jfoutz 6y agomuch higher stakes and much less response time. There are plenty of city drivers that get confused and, well, pull over or even just stop. it's irritating, but a sensible thing to do. On a freeway, that's terrifying. It _seems_ like lots of parallel systems, each with the capability to reduce speed or stop could cope with city traffic about as well as a tourist. but, uh, I guess $2.5B says otherwise.
- taf2 6y agoI bought an iRobot and I really think if they incorporated a camera it could be significantly better. There are obvious things it picks up and gets stuck in like shoelaces and power cables. Obviously a vacuum is not self driving but it’s a similar problem and at least my casual observation is that proximity sensors along won’t solve real world navigation because we need some kind of inference to understand what the impact of an objects presence would be if we ran over it or not... I believe there has to be a solution with many sensors visual and lidar mapping makes sense too
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoAutonomous driving to me seems a lot like the domain of robotic crowd navigation, and the crowd navigation research seems to show us that most of the methods suspected in-use by AV programs tend to fall apart under trivial thresholds of uncertainty/congestion. So, I'm less surprised that Uber didn't make much fundamental progress here, and more surprised that anybody else has done better. edit: I say this as someone who very much wants to see this class of science & technology succeed, but I often wonder if we're 2 or 3 Fields Medals away from really getting fundamentally closer to success.
- koheripbal 6y agoI think people really underestimate how complex autonomoous driving is. Even the best tech today can only drive reliably and safely in good daylight weather conditions, with no chance of protests.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago>> Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-third of a mile on average. Pretty sure my wife would claim that I'm worse than that...
- jariel 6y agoThe relative safety and performance of autonomous anything is very, very hard to measure - there are so many variables. Even on identical systems, different parameters will create totally different outcomes. Maybe it has 'sudden movements' because it's actually a lot after and designed to react to things that Waymo would just plow right through. Maybe they're using crappy non-production sensors. Maybe they are entirely relying on instruments and not indirect data like GPS. I have no idea really, other than to say, these are very sophisticated systems and given the obvious opacity of the work ... it's going to be hard to tell what's what.
- jimmydorry 6y agoAbsolutely. Great comment, however it's probably worth pointing out that the research and trial sensors are going to be high end, while the finished product will use the cheapest available or commericial sensors. This is a scary prospect.
- Skunkleton 6y ago> That's really bad. While there are no uniform standards for what a "bad experience" entails, my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) are doing 10-100x better by that metric. For for that matter, ever 3 or 30 miles would also be really bad in my book.
- ghaff 6y agoEveryone has made disappointingly little progress on full self-driving in the sense of driving little Johnny from the house to soccer practice by himself. There are possibly opportunities on freeways but anyone who expects to be able to get robo-Ubers door-to-door for decades is likely to be disappointed.
- smachiz 6y agolol. You're VASTLY underestimating how much progress is being made by companies that aren't Uber. 3-10 years is a more realistic timetable than decades. "People overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10".
- KKKKkkkk1 6y ago> Everyone has made disappointingly little progress on full self-driving in the sense of driving little Johnny from the house to soccer practice by himself. Here's a video of Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov claiming that he's perfectly comfortable putting his children in a Waymo car without a driver: https://youtu.be/fZHDvKw0QTA?t=952 https://youtu.be/fZHDvKw0QTA?t=952. Whether he's bluffing or not, we don't know.
- ghaff 6y agoIt will possibly be safe enough under some well-tested limited circumstances/locations. I'm skeptical that translates into something made generally available.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]