6 ms·

We are going to need a fundamental breakthrough in AI to achieve the level of FSD that people expect. Like a convolutional neural network level breakthrough.

belter 5y ago
I suggest some simple Smoke Tests. I love that concept for software testing. It could be applied here to test if we are getting closer or further from what humans can do. Some examples: Smoke Test 1: Driving with Snow Smoke Test 2: Driving with Rain Smoke Test 3: You are driving to a Red sign and you notice 50 meters ahead a pedestrian has its headphones on. The pedestrian is distracted and looking at traffic coming from the other way. You notice from the pedestrian gait and demeanor its probably going to cross anyway and its not noticing you. So you instinctively slowly reduce your speed and keep a sharp eye on its next action. Smoke Test 4: Keep eye contact with a Dutch cyclist as they look at you across a roundabout. You realize they will cross in front of your car, so you already inferred their intentions. Today the cyclist bad humor will not make them raise their hand or make any other signs to you other than an angry face. You however already know they will push forward... Smoke Test 5: A little soccer ball just run across your vision field. You hit the breaks hard, as you instinctively think a child might show up any second running after it. Failing any of these scenarios would make you fail the driving license exam so I guess its the minimum we should aim for. Call me back when any AI is able to even start tackling ANY of these, much less All of these scenarios. :-)
- dragontamer 5y ago
  This "FSD" package is still at the "Don't hit this balloon we dressed up to look like a human" stage.
- jtvjan 5y ago
  >the cyclist bad humor slecht humeur? That's "bad mood".
  - belter 5y ago
    You are right. Was on mobile. Cannot edit it anymore...:-)
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      As an English first speaker, I didn't even notice it when reading. It's a somewhat odd phrasing (yet not exceptionally so) but still makes sense. See second definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor
bobsomers 5y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. There are plenty of people in the AV space that routinely drive significantly better than this and are already doing completely driverless service in some geofences. The problem with Tesla's approach has always been that Elon wanted to sell it before he actually knew anything about how to solve it. It's lead to series of compounding errors in Tesla's approach to AVs. The vehicle's sensor suite is woefully inadequate and its compute (yes, even with the fancy Tesla chip) is woefully underpowered... all because Elon never really pushed to figure out where the boundary of the problem was. They started with lane-keeping on highways where everything is easy and pre-sold a "full self-driving" software update with absolutely no roadmap to get there. To overcome the poor sensor suite and anemic compute, they've boxed themselves into having to invent AGI to solve the problem. Everyone else in the space has happily chosen to spend more on sensors and compute to make the problem computationally tractable, because those things will easily get cheaper over time. I'm fairly convinced that if Tesla wants to ship true FSD within the next decade, the necessary sensor and compute retrofit would nearly bankrupt the company. The only way out is likely to slowly move the goal posts within the legalese to make FSD just a fancy Level 2 driver assist and claim that's always what it was meant to be.
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  We need so many compute and TFLOPS before the software has been completed but it won't surprise me if they come up with Tesla Cloud driving powered by Starlink with a bunch of hamsters in a warehouse somewhere actually driving the car. I mean they trained pigeon's to guide bombs in WW2.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Definitely agree on the sensor suite. Even wanting to do things vision only is ok, but the cars simply don't have enough cameras for redundancy. You are a little rain or mud away from having a system that no longer operates.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  Yep, also over-promising that legacy cars with the "FSD-readiness" upgrade would be guaranteed to support FSD was a completely unforced error. At this point it's pretty obvious none of the original "FSD ready" cars Tesla shipped will be able to handle L4/L5 autonomy hardware-wise. Arguably none of the cars currently rolling off the line will be either - others have made the point in the thread: while nobody has really cracked autonomy fully, other players (see: Waymo, Cruise) are clearly much further along with a very different sensor and compute suite than anything Tesla has shipped or currently ships.
rasz 5y ago
Most problems in those clips didnt require general AI, they were caused by shit vision algorithms. Car didnt spot huge ass monorail columns ...
- serverholic 5y ago
  I didn't say general AI.
bob1029 5y ago
I think we should first start with a fundamental breakthrough in our willingness as engineers to admit defeat in the face of underestimated complexity. Once we take proper inventory of where we are at, we may find that we are still so far off the mark that we would be inclined to throw away all of our current designs and start over again from (new) first principles. The notion that you can iteratively solve the full-self-driving problem on the current generation of cars is potentially one of the bigger scams in tech today (at least as marketed). I think a lot of people are deluding themselves about the nature of this local minima. It is going to cost us a lot of human capital over the long haul. Being wrong and having to start over certainly sucks really badly, but it is still better than the direction we are currently headed in.
- enahs-sf 5y ago
  I think we're beginning to see the true endgame to Tesla's strategy. Elon initially said first you build the prototype to raise the capital to finance the expensive car which you build to fund the mid-priced car which you scale to build the cheap car. In reality, we're still at step two which is the expensive car and the R&D to build the real thing. As a model Y owner, I'm quite skeptical about this generation of vehicles being able to truly hit the mark on FSD.
- belter 5y ago
  In other words, and as somebody said: "Just because we can put a man on the Moon does not mean we can put a man on the Sun" :-)
threeseed 5y ago
Cruise has videos showing them driving around for hours, under challenging conditions with no issues: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw

belter 5y ago

I suggest some simple Smoke Tests. I love that concept for software testing. It could be applied here to test if we are getting closer or further from what humans can do. Some examples: Smoke Test 1: Driving with Snow Smoke Test 2: Driving with Rain Smoke Test 3: You are driving to a Red sign and you notice 50 meters ahead a pedestrian has its headphones on. The pedestrian is distracted and looking at traffic coming from the other way. You notice from the pedestrian gait and demeanor its probably going to cross anyway and its not noticing you. So you instinctively slowly reduce your speed and keep a sharp eye on its next action. Smoke Test 4: Keep eye contact with a Dutch cyclist as they look at you across a roundabout. You realize they will cross in front of your car, so you already inferred their intentions. Today the cyclist bad humor will not make them raise their hand or make any other signs to you other than an angry face. You however already know they will push forward... Smoke Test 5: A little soccer ball just run across your vision field. You hit the breaks hard, as you instinctively think a child might show up any second running after it. Failing any of these scenarios would make you fail the driving license exam so I guess its the minimum we should aim for. Call me back when any AI is able to even start tackling ANY of these, much less All of these scenarios. :-)

dragontamer 5y ago
This "FSD" package is still at the "Don't hit this balloon we dressed up to look like a human" stage.
jtvjan 5y ago
>the cyclist bad humor slecht humeur? That's "bad mood".
- belter 5y ago
  You are right. Was on mobile. Cannot edit it anymore...:-)
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    As an English first speaker, I didn't even notice it when reading. It's a somewhat odd phrasing (yet not exceptionally so) but still makes sense. See second definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor

bobsomers 5y ago

I don't think that's necessarily true. There are plenty of people in the AV space that routinely drive significantly better than this and are already doing completely driverless service in some geofences. The problem with Tesla's approach has always been that Elon wanted to sell it before he actually knew anything about how to solve it. It's lead to series of compounding errors in Tesla's approach to AVs. The vehicle's sensor suite is woefully inadequate and its compute (yes, even with the fancy Tesla chip) is woefully underpowered... all because Elon never really pushed to figure out where the boundary of the problem was. They started with lane-keeping on highways where everything is easy and pre-sold a "full self-driving" software update with absolutely no roadmap to get there. To overcome the poor sensor suite and anemic compute, they've boxed themselves into having to invent AGI to solve the problem. Everyone else in the space has happily chosen to spend more on sensors and compute to make the problem computationally tractable, because those things will easily get cheaper over time. I'm fairly convinced that if Tesla wants to ship true FSD within the next decade, the necessary sensor and compute retrofit would nearly bankrupt the company. The only way out is likely to slowly move the goal posts within the legalese to make FSD just a fancy Level 2 driver assist and claim that's always what it was meant to be.

tibbydudeza 5y ago
We need so many compute and TFLOPS before the software has been completed but it won't surprise me if they come up with Tesla Cloud driving powered by Starlink with a bunch of hamsters in a warehouse somewhere actually driving the car. I mean they trained pigeon's to guide bombs in WW2.
cogman10 5y ago
Definitely agree on the sensor suite. Even wanting to do things vision only is ok, but the cars simply don't have enough cameras for redundancy. You are a little rain or mud away from having a system that no longer operates.
potatolicious 5y ago
Yep, also over-promising that legacy cars with the "FSD-readiness" upgrade would be guaranteed to support FSD was a completely unforced error. At this point it's pretty obvious none of the original "FSD ready" cars Tesla shipped will be able to handle L4/L5 autonomy hardware-wise. Arguably none of the cars currently rolling off the line will be either - others have made the point in the thread: while nobody has really cracked autonomy fully, other players (see: Waymo, Cruise) are clearly much further along with a very different sensor and compute suite than anything Tesla has shipped or currently ships.

rasz 5y ago

Most problems in those clips didnt require general AI, they were caused by shit vision algorithms. Car didnt spot huge ass monorail columns ...

serverholic 5y ago
I didn't say general AI.

bob1029 5y ago

I think we should first start with a fundamental breakthrough in our willingness as engineers to admit defeat in the face of underestimated complexity. Once we take proper inventory of where we are at, we may find that we are still so far off the mark that we would be inclined to throw away all of our current designs and start over again from (new) first principles. The notion that you can iteratively solve the full-self-driving problem on the current generation of cars is potentially one of the bigger scams in tech today (at least as marketed). I think a lot of people are deluding themselves about the nature of this local minima. It is going to cost us a lot of human capital over the long haul. Being wrong and having to start over certainly sucks really badly, but it is still better than the direction we are currently headed in.

enahs-sf 5y ago
I think we're beginning to see the true endgame to Tesla's strategy. Elon initially said first you build the prototype to raise the capital to finance the expensive car which you build to fund the mid-priced car which you scale to build the cheap car. In reality, we're still at step two which is the expensive car and the R&D to build the real thing. As a model Y owner, I'm quite skeptical about this generation of vehicles being able to truly hit the mark on FSD.
belter 5y ago
In other words, and as somebody said: "Just because we can put a man on the Moon does not mean we can put a man on the Sun" :-)

threeseed 5y ago

Cruise has videos showing them driving around for hours, under challenging conditions with no issues: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw