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So, is Waymo the next Theranos? The CEO the article is about wasn't exactly at the frontwards edge of technology, he was an automotive industry expert. I'm co

So, is Waymo the next Theranos? The CEO the article is about wasn't exactly at the frontwards edge of technology, he was an automotive industry expert. I'm concerned about the numbers, but I'm hopeful about change in leadership. Especially given the ties with Google, possessing an insane, astronomical amount of street-based data. Surely they can scrape together a L2 driving agent given a few years?

davidcbc 6y ago
An L2 driving agent was never the goal. An L2 car isn't a self driving car no matter what Elon says.
- ajross 6y ago
  Seems like an "L2 car" is what the market wants and can get, though. Elon may not say what you want him to say, but he's selling these things like hotcakes. Broadly: that's seems like senseless pedantry to me. Tesla owners, even numerate serious ones who understand the problem area, know when their car is "driving itself" and when it isn't. Quoting industry jargon to explain to people how the product isn't akshooally doing what it clearly is isn't going to win many arguments.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Tesla is L2 because it's 99.5% safe and requires supervision for the last 0.5%. People are bad at that kind of supervisory task-- they see it work a couple of times and stop paying attention. And it doesn't get to me taking a nap in the car and ending up at Disneyland-- at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      A long drive slightly less fatiguing is better than a short drive in a limited area of operation. This, I think, is why Tesla will eventually succeed. Every Tesla sold is gathering data about its environment and phoning home - we already know that. So whether you have Autopilot or not, Tesla gets data for its Full Self-Driving Capability; when you swerve to avoid a possum at 12:47 a.m. because you've been working all day and night and into the morning and you really need some Whataburger, or, if you must... In-N-Out..., some engineer somewhere at Tesla can look at that event, see why you swerved out of lane, recognize it was a possum, and then jot that down into his or her notebook... twwooo... forrrtty-seeeven... ayyy emmm... driver swwwerved... to avoid... possum..., integrate possum-avoidance behavior into Autopilot for next release...
      - mlyle 6y ago
        That would be valid if Tesla is really collecting all of that data. But the people who have done analysis of what the cars sends back say that what is actually sent is very limited statistics on times, locations, and general characteristics of disengagements (speed, direction, list of detected targets, etc). This is doubtlessly useful but it's not something you can just drop into training a neural network or even be sure exactly what the issue was. They can write query strings for very specific situations they're interested in, too, and receive video frames. On the other hand, Waymo is gathering vision data on every drive, and ground truth LIDAR data.
      - lupire 6y ago
        If it were that easy then Tesla could have just bought dash cam video from drivers of all cars, and have far more data.
    - ajross 6y ago
      > at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing ...which sounds like kind of a killer feature to me? (Like, it really is -- I may be within days of pulling the trigger on a Model Y). Can you walk back and explain how making long drives more fun is somehow a disappointment?
      - mlyle 6y ago
        It's a win. But-- if it's just driving freeway miles and lanekeeping and doing basic collision avoidance-- there's a lot of cars doing that and Tesla is in first place but not strongly differentiated from GM, etc. Other cars can provide you this "less fatiguing road trip" experience. If you want it to actually drive and be able to remove your attention, well, something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI makes the present limits rather clear.
        tibbydudeza 6y ago
        Pretty crappy results even for a beta - left turn into oncoming traffic in a clear highway seems like a standard test case.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) Pretty much every car vendor already has L2 autonomy [1] - Google's not going to extract tens of billions of dollars by selling the industry something they already have. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level_2_automated_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level...
    - ajross 6y ago
      > The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) On the contrary, it proves that the other thing doesn't exist. Which is sort of important to analysis. I know that's glib. My point was the pontification about what "self driving autonomy" is or should be or might be or is supposed to be or (my personal peeve) "is supposed to be called" is essentially meaningless when we could be discussing what is actually happening in a vibrant and interesting market. I get it. People think about this stuff in the abstract. But it's not an abstract problem anymore, and I think arguments like yours are very much missing the forest for the trees. Roll back the clock to, say, 1985 and let's imagine we're talking about network technology. Elon is selling a working TCP/IP stack while you're yelling about the fact that akshooally it doesn't conform to the proper OSI layers and so can't ever be a successful network. How did history work out for the OSI pedants? Same principle.
      - davidcbc 6y ago
        Elon is selling a "Full Self Driving car" that is not full self driving at all by Tesla's own admission. It isn't doing the thing it is advertised to do. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo... https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self-driving-beta-is-just-laughably-bad-and-potentially-dangerous/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self... Calling an L2 car "full self driving" is incredibly irresponsible. I personally hope Musk faces consequences when yet another Tesla kills someone because of false advertising.
adrenalinelol 6y ago
I don't think it's comparable to Theranos. He took over a company w/a heavily (but still in a pre launch) product in its "beta" phase and was chosen for an obvious reason (get the tech into cars). He doesn't have the technical chops to understand the tech enough to know whether it's ready for prime-time or not aside from looking at metrics some of his engineering subordinates gave him. Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product which functioned like she claimed at all (nothing compared to the tech Waymo has already developed)... She assumed w/enough effort her ideas would eventually come to fruition, so she lied about the progress her company had made so gullible investors would fork over $$. Waymo has non-tech people trying to sell a tech which is still in development, they've made an (incorrect) assumption about when it'll be ready, as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult.
- adenozine 6y ago
  Unrelated: I like the similarity of your username to mine. As to your point, I agree with you. I guess the comparison was meant in quite a pointed way that went over the heads of a lot of commenters here. I was meaning to just draw attention to the fact that juxtaposing the numbers 82000 -> 600ish is quite a fantastical leap. From what I've read about the older Waymo days, I think the leadership ideas were a lot different than what they became under Krafcik. It's hard to imagine from where I'm sitting, such a stark pivot from inside the company. I think Krafcik probably meant as well in the claims, they need X # of vehicles and so that implies that there must be X # of agents ready to pilot vehicles or that many vehicles even ready for installation and operation/testing. Of course they were very much further than Theranos, I guess it's just the sheer magnitude of the claims in Krafcik's place. All this to say: I don't know anything about cars, self-driving cars, electric cars, rental cars, etc. I do know bullshit when I see it, and Krafcik was selling it like someone with bills to pay.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult. You see a few people saying we need AGI but yeah. I've definitely been a skeptic but mostly in the vein of it needing decades, not single digit years. And the transition to even a true L4 system is going to be hard. That said, we seen a lot of progress and even over the past ten years, there's been a lot of progress on assistive driving system as well as field work on actual self-driving. I suspect that machine-assisted driving will continue to get better, albeit with issues associated with humans increasingly not really paying attention. But I expect those wanting robo-Ubers will continue to be disappointed for quite some time. (And I'm not sure how much it will matter because they will have actual Ubers.)
rantwasp 6y ago
yes. and tesla will actually have the first FSD car /s

davidcbc 6y ago

An L2 driving agent was never the goal. An L2 car isn't a self driving car no matter what Elon says.

ajross 6y ago
Seems like an "L2 car" is what the market wants and can get, though. Elon may not say what you want him to say, but he's selling these things like hotcakes. Broadly: that's seems like senseless pedantry to me. Tesla owners, even numerate serious ones who understand the problem area, know when their car is "driving itself" and when it isn't. Quoting industry jargon to explain to people how the product isn't akshooally doing what it clearly is isn't going to win many arguments.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Tesla is L2 because it's 99.5% safe and requires supervision for the last 0.5%. People are bad at that kind of supervisory task-- they see it work a couple of times and stop paying attention. And it doesn't get to me taking a nap in the car and ending up at Disneyland-- at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    A long drive slightly less fatiguing is better than a short drive in a limited area of operation. This, I think, is why Tesla will eventually succeed. Every Tesla sold is gathering data about its environment and phoning home - we already know that. So whether you have Autopilot or not, Tesla gets data for its Full Self-Driving Capability; when you swerve to avoid a possum at 12:47 a.m. because you've been working all day and night and into the morning and you really need some Whataburger, or, if you must... In-N-Out..., some engineer somewhere at Tesla can look at that event, see why you swerved out of lane, recognize it was a possum, and then jot that down into his or her notebook... twwooo... forrrtty-seeeven... ayyy emmm... driver swwwerved... to avoid... possum..., integrate possum-avoidance behavior into Autopilot for next release...
    - mlyle 6y ago
      That would be valid if Tesla is really collecting all of that data. But the people who have done analysis of what the cars sends back say that what is actually sent is very limited statistics on times, locations, and general characteristics of disengagements (speed, direction, list of detected targets, etc). This is doubtlessly useful but it's not something you can just drop into training a neural network or even be sure exactly what the issue was. They can write query strings for very specific situations they're interested in, too, and receive video frames. On the other hand, Waymo is gathering vision data on every drive, and ground truth LIDAR data.
    - lupire 6y ago
      If it were that easy then Tesla could have just bought dash cam video from drivers of all cars, and have far more data.
  - ajross 6y ago
    > at best it makes a long drive slightly less fatiguing ...which sounds like kind of a killer feature to me? (Like, it really is -- I may be within days of pulling the trigger on a Model Y). Can you walk back and explain how making long drives more fun is somehow a disappointment?
    - mlyle 6y ago
      It's a win. But-- if it's just driving freeway miles and lanekeeping and doing basic collision avoidance-- there's a lot of cars doing that and Tesla is in first place but not strongly differentiated from GM, etc. Other cars can provide you this "less fatiguing road trip" experience. If you want it to actually drive and be able to remove your attention, well, something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uClWlVCwHsI makes the present limits rather clear.
      - tibbydudeza 6y ago
        Pretty crappy results even for a beta - left turn into oncoming traffic in a clear highway seems like a standard test case.
- michaelt 6y ago
  The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) Pretty much every car vendor already has L2 autonomy [1] - Google's not going to extract tens of billions of dollars by selling the industry something they already have. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level_2_automated_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_centering#Sample_of_level...
  - ajross 6y ago
    > The fact something that exists is selling better than something that doesn't exist doesn't really prove much :) On the contrary, it proves that the other thing doesn't exist. Which is sort of important to analysis. I know that's glib. My point was the pontification about what "self driving autonomy" is or should be or might be or is supposed to be or (my personal peeve) "is supposed to be called" is essentially meaningless when we could be discussing what is actually happening in a vibrant and interesting market. I get it. People think about this stuff in the abstract. But it's not an abstract problem anymore, and I think arguments like yours are very much missing the forest for the trees. Roll back the clock to, say, 1985 and let's imagine we're talking about network technology. Elon is selling a working TCP/IP stack while you're yelling about the fact that akshooally it doesn't conform to the proper OSI layers and so can't ever be a successful network. How did history work out for the OSI pedants? Same principle.
    - davidcbc 6y ago
      Elon is selling a "Full Self Driving car" that is not full self driving at all by Tesla's own admission. It isn't doing the thing it is advertised to do. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo... https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self-driving-beta-is-just-laughably-bad-and-potentially-dangerous/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35878363/teslas-full-self... Calling an L2 car "full self driving" is incredibly irresponsible. I personally hope Musk faces consequences when yet another Tesla kills someone because of false advertising.

adrenalinelol 6y ago

I don't think it's comparable to Theranos. He took over a company w/a heavily (but still in a pre launch) product in its "beta" phase and was chosen for an obvious reason (get the tech into cars). He doesn't have the technical chops to understand the tech enough to know whether it's ready for prime-time or not aside from looking at metrics some of his engineering subordinates gave him. Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product which functioned like she claimed at all (nothing compared to the tech Waymo has already developed)... She assumed w/enough effort her ideas would eventually come to fruition, so she lied about the progress her company had made so gullible investors would fork over $$. Waymo has non-tech people trying to sell a tech which is still in development, they've made an (incorrect) assumption about when it'll be ready, as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult.

adenozine 6y ago
Unrelated: I like the similarity of your username to mine. As to your point, I agree with you. I guess the comparison was meant in quite a pointed way that went over the heads of a lot of commenters here. I was meaning to just draw attention to the fact that juxtaposing the numbers 82000 -> 600ish is quite a fantastical leap. From what I've read about the older Waymo days, I think the leadership ideas were a lot different than what they became under Krafcik. It's hard to imagine from where I'm sitting, such a stark pivot from inside the company. I think Krafcik probably meant as well in the claims, they need X # of vehicles and so that implies that there must be X # of agents ready to pilot vehicles or that many vehicles even ready for installation and operation/testing. Of course they were very much further than Theranos, I guess it's just the sheer magnitude of the claims in Krafcik's place. All this to say: I don't know anything about cars, self-driving cars, electric cars, rental cars, etc. I do know bullshit when I see it, and Krafcik was selling it like someone with bills to pay.
ghaff 6y ago
>as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult. You see a few people saying we need AGI but yeah. I've definitely been a skeptic but mostly in the vein of it needing decades, not single digit years. And the transition to even a true L4 system is going to be hard. That said, we seen a lot of progress and even over the past ten years, there's been a lot of progress on assistive driving system as well as field work on actual self-driving. I suspect that machine-assisted driving will continue to get better, albeit with issues associated with humans increasingly not really paying attention. But I expect those wanting robo-Ubers will continue to be disappointed for quite some time. (And I'm not sure how much it will matter because they will have actual Ubers.)

rantwasp 6y ago

yes. and tesla will actually have the first FSD car /s