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From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented that their intention is to drive down the cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale and better technology. My personal belief is that the data acquired from LIDAR representing a at-this-moment-in-time snapshot of a vehicle's surroundings is very valuable, and Cruise is probably going down the right path with this. Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene (eg: a pedestrian wearing a black or dark blue jacket who is walking a black or brown labrador retriever across an unmarked crosswalk in Seattle level mid winter rain, at night time, something I literally saw just two nights ago).

spikels 5y ago
But obviously if it can be done with just cameras, that’s going to be the winning solution (cheaper, simpler, etc). Let’s try a diverse set of strategies and see which one wins in the real world. Nobody knows for sure at this point.
XCSme 5y ago
> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).
- siddarthd2919 5y ago
  No, not with edge cases detection. In the Lidar vs Camera context - Camera depth models have a lot of room to improve
- jeffbee 5y ago
  LOL no, not even remotely close. ML image classifiers will decide that an otter is a bicycle with some invisible (to humans) noise injected into the chroma. And that's state-of-the-art classifiers, which Tesla does not possess.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    I am asking mostly because the image captchas are starting to be really tough for humans, but ML can easily detect cars, boats and road signs.
- jowday 5y ago
  > Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? On some benchmarks, AI models are better at very well defined tasks like image classification (“label this image from a set of 8 labels you’ve seen before”) or object detection (“draw a box around all instances of class X in this image, where X is a very narrowly defined class”) They’re not even close to being able to understand unscene examples and parse out their meaning in a larger context the way humans can. (“Recognize that this object in the road is a human riding some sort of bizarre unicycle he welded himself, then predict how he’s likely to move given the structure of his custom unicycle thing”) The bottleneck in AVs isn’t “perception” in the sense of image classification and object detection, it’s deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be some extra input data to the ML model.
    - jowday 5y ago
      The sort of abstract reasoning I’m talking about is beyond the capabilities of any ML model that will run onboard a car - the “abstract reasoning” problem in AVs right now is solved primarily through HD mapping and remote assistance. LIDAR is useful for a ton of other reasons - ground truth depth, high visibility at night, great for localization - and can detect if something’s an obstacle or not without having seen it before (but false positives can be an issue). Broadly speaking, people who focus on Camera vs LiDAR are missing the mark and don’t understand that the real difference between big AV players and consumer cars is HD maps and remote support.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      LIDAR data contains highly accurate depth information, at which point you don't need the abstract reasoning nearly so much. You can at least do basic object tracking and collision prevention without it.
- z2 5y ago
  I've been out of it for a while, but my understanding is that humans are still better at video recognition and extracting high-level information from moving videos, while the state of the art CV still tends to focus on rapid frame-by-frame static classification, with some semblance of persistence and motion strung together at the end.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  There are certain tasks where the models can do better than certain kinds of human effort (e.g. can do better than a person who is tired from doing a thousand of these in a row, is paying very little attention, is spending very little time, and doesn't really care), but that hasn't translated into actually doing image recognition better than humans.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't going to work. They are an engineering company, and they will attempt to engineer their way out of the wrong decision (vision only) if they have to in order to deliver. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-radar-electric-cars/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-radar-e... [2] https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf (Page 3-4, rich point cloud data, improved velocity resolution from 60GHz sensors, looks a lot like the benefits you'd get from LIDAR)
- wbl 5y ago
  There's a word for engineers that program cars to break the law resulting in deaths, and one of the first law codes specifies the appropriate punishment. Tesla is not operating in a way any ethical engineer should tolerate.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900 million to the United States government in 2014 [1]. Tesla's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2]. Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... [2] https://tesladeaths.com/ https://tesladeaths.com/
    - jdlshore 5y ago
      Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.
bluGill 5y ago
My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I come of the top of hills and trust there is nothing on the other side where I can't see until I'm over the top and it would be too late. Backup cameras have been very useful, and take away something I would have said a few years ago. The above is situations I know of offhand hand were my vision isn't up to the task yet I do anyway - because I don't really have other options. If other sensors can outdo me then I want them.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
  i hope you at least slow down around blind bends and corners. that shit is scary. see people racing over such obstacles all the time. i assume there will instead be a crash or deer or corgi or child hiding behind every obstacle
- epgui 5y ago
  That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just because a human is at the wheel.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I don't think that was the parent's point. These things could be made safer with other detection technologies beyond plain cameras. A human driver can make a conscious, nuanced decision to make these "faith-based decisions", but a computer may not be able to. So perhaps it might just completely refuse to drive in those situations if all it has is a camera, but it can't see anything due to fog or terrain, even if it would be somewhat safe for a human to drive in that situation.
    - epgui 5y ago
      It's really not clear to me what gives a human the nearly-magical ability to make decisions that a computer could not possibly make. If anything, I think we've seen that computers are much better than humans at making decisions in an ever-expanding set of narrow contexts (eg.: chess, go, protein folding...). It's not so much a matter of "can a computer do it better", it's more a question of "when are we going to figure out how to break down the problem in a way that a computer can solve much better than a human".
sroussey 5y ago
And you can just shine a Q-beam at such a car.
- judge2020 5y ago
  You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier, and pretty much every lane-keeping system will follow them.
  - _kuvn 5y ago
    > You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier To paraphrase XKCD [0] - if you want to cause accidents, there are other failure mechanisms that'd work on humans as well [0] https://xkcd.com/1958/ https://xkcd.com/1958/
ModernMech 5y ago
That's because Kyle competed with MIT in the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is where the architecture for the modern driverless car was battle tested. LIDAR was by far and away the enabling technology in those competitions. Every team that finished in the DUC had a Velodyne 64 LIDAR. They are that important. For whatever reason, Tesla has decided to eschew this hard-earned wisdom, have treated their customers and the general public as an extension of their corporate research lab and their customers and others have paid the price for it with their lives. During the DUC, contestants competed in an abandoned military base in the middle of the desert. In that environment, the vehicles were outfitted with all matter of flashing lights, emergency stop procedures, and all humans had to clear the area. That's what robot research was like in 2007. And our cars didn't have a verified track record of deaths! Little did we know at the time, we could've just held the DARPA Urban challenge in the middle of downtown SF. Apparently we wouldn't even have needed to inform the unwitting public that an experiment involving a 2 ton machine that has killed people in the past was taking place in their midst.
WWLink 5y ago
Don't forget, Tesla uses cheap 1280x960 cameras (citation needed - they may have upgraded)... pointing out a potentially dirty windshield.
- ahmedalsudani 5y ago
  Not sure about the resolution, but the sensor is rather large. Resolution isn't nearly as important as being able to see clearly in low light. Re: dirty windshield. Humans see through those, and we have windshield wipers if visibility is impeded. I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job.
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    > I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job. Not for Tesla. So many interventions. So many situations where the car actively tries to kill the driver and pedestrians.
    - onethought 5y ago
      But it's not finished. Have you asked Cruise testers how many interventions they have had to do in equivalent drives as Tesla FSD Beta? It's strange to me that Tesla who are building this in the open are criticised for being dishonest. Meanwhile ALL the competitors are closed door private development and some how we should trust them more? In an industry that is known for deceitful behaviour.
      - waffle_maniac 5y ago
        > Last year, Waymo logged 29,945 autonomous miles between reported disengagements. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169984987942913 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169984987942913 > Cruise drove 41,719 miles in autonomous mode per disengagement. > Waymo drove 2.36 million miles autonomously with one accident that was the vehicle's fault. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1495801454111727616 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1495801454111727616
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
judge2020 5y ago
The thing is that I can't find any examples of Tesla's vision only system in FSD Beta not detecting any objects - all the failures are on the 'driving AI' side, ie. it makes the bad decision to try to turn right into a cyclist despite the cyclist being displayed on the center screen[0]. 0: https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?s=20&t=pVxN3zpRF08l1B4gNhBIhw https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?...
- jowday 5y ago
  There are tons of examples of objects flickering in and out of existence, not being detected, warping in weird ways. This is one of the most recent tweets from a prominent Tesla reverse engineer with plenty of examples. https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923
  - judge2020 5y ago
    That's still detection, even if it can't precisely map the edge of the semi while cars are moving by; sometimes what's on screen isn't representative of what actual bounds the car thinks is off-limits, as we can see here[0] where the model of the commercial truck clips the car's model on-screen. He seems to support this theory that the problem is mostly the brain of the car[1], at least regarding how lidar won't help with object detection in general. 0: https://youtu.be/ttvBZtqxlRo?t=630 https://youtu.be/ttvBZtqxlRo?t=630 1: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?s=20&t=_rsU_kXTky21P5RqNNHGdw https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?..., and auxiliarily: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?s=20&t=UIH7ehg0imsDYc1Qpku8Hg https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?...
nbardy 5y ago
I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the key for building model backbones that you can retrain for downstream tasks.
- jowday 5y ago
  I don’t think image+text pair models (E.G. CLIP) would be very useful for AV tasks. They’re not very good at fine-grained classification or counting the number of instances in a scene. Not even getting into latency or model size.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  How much of that camera data is labeled for distance measurement use cases?
  - vardump 5y ago
    Because cars (generally) move, probably most of it. You can compare successive frames and make predictions.
    - ironman1478 5y ago
      I think Tesla actually used radar data to provide ground truth for this. So they don't even do that to generate ground truth. What happens if things have the same relative speed when doing the labeling? Or low light conditions? How do you account for per part variation in lens and sensor designs and how it messes with your predictions?
- rhacker 5y ago
  8+ responding distance dots that are much closer than they should be are already a STOP, APPLY BREAKS situation where not much ML is even needed. That's the beauty of LIDAR. It will save lives unlike Tesla's driving into obvious poles/truck booms mistaken for a statue of liberty in Nebraska.
kelnos 5y ago
I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on them are ugly as sin. That really doesn't jive with Tesla's brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range. Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.
- madamelic 5y ago
  > I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new sensors. Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond that and have the cars become superhuman rather than having to depend on all sensors to consistently be working to have a safe vehicle.
  - fieldcny 5y ago
    Just to state the obvious, that assumes other sensors are net additive. I’m not sure how valid an assumption that is, they could wind up just adding complexity and creating noise.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    You don't have to remove sensors to write code that way. And what if the best answer is being extremely good at lidar-only and then adding in cameras on top.
    - freshpots 5y ago
      They should still have radar to see through fog/rain but they abandoned it, as Green said: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496575861822267403 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496575861822267403 now is a terrible time to buy a new Tesla car. But I do realize not everybody can wait it out
    - 5y ago
jseliger 5y ago
This interview with MobileEye: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-with-mobileye-ceo-prof-amnon-shashua-the-future-of-autonomous-driving https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-... says they're going to release hardware for level 4 autonomy by 2024 or 2025.
markstos 5y ago
Cars are already complex enough to make them vulnerable to global supply chain challenges. The more tech that's required to put a car on the road, the more challenged that manufacturer is going to be have enough inventory of all the components to actually ship cars. I agree that LIDAR is valuable and hope all these companies are all able make safe cars with their tech stacks.
blankley 5y ago
You may well be describing me, as a Seattle resident with a blue coat and a chocolate lab who currently has an upset stomach and is in need of many walks recently. We're working on the food/diet part, but your comment inspired me to buy a reflective arm band for myself. His harness is already a bit reflective. Anyway, thought it was funny and thanks for the sanity check/advice.
stainforth 5y ago
> cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale Is there some cost prohibitive licensing on it that affects adoption the way e-ink patents have limited product creation?
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > the way e-ink patents have limited product creation Such incredible confidence in that statement that there is not even a hint or need to offer up any evidence or anything at all. HN is amazing. Dunning Kruger rules here.
  - glup 5y ago
    Note the question mark in the OP’s comment. Also, pretty sure the e-ink limitation is common knowledge on HN. Yep, HN is amazing.
    - robinsoh 5y ago
      You've misunderstood his sentence then if you think the question mark is justifying the e-ink claim about patents. And if you look at my comment history, you'll see that this repeated claim/statement about patents vs electrophoretic products is unsubstantiated and no one has been able to provide any factual support for it. I stand by my claim that HN seems to have a lot of Dunningites when it comes to electrophoretics.
crsnaway1234 5y ago
This story is getting front-paged less about the tech or business aspects and more about so many in YC feeling validation through this outcome. But Kyle’s announcement is pretty minimal because it’s really more of a handoff than a validation of the YC country club. Dan Amman’s original edict to Cruise was to Beat Uber. Uber was not just disruptive in 2016, but they really wanted everyone to feel the size of their ambition. E.g. they placed an order for 100,000 Mercedes S-Classes that ATG was going to then equip. Uber could raise billions easily, and they were culturally reckless, so the OEMs thought them a threat. When Dan Amman took over, his pay package showed he very much wanted to be a Silicon Valley billionaire (see S-1 docs) who saved GM. And he had history with Mary. To Kyle, Mary is much closer to a boss, but to Dan, Mary is more of a colleague. Fast forward to today and the self-driving landscape has changed a ton. Uber barfed all over themselves and COVID has changed the world. Dan Amman no longer had a case for making him a SV billionaire, and he never was able to fix Cruise’s culture problems* anyway. So the change makes a ton of sense, and I’m sure Dan will find some other way to become as rich as sama or Justin Kan. Dan has already done a ton for GM and he’s good at what he does. * I left Cruise a while ago and while Kyle hired a lot of good people, he also hired a ton of jerks. In some cases he did it personally. I have four different stalkers from Cruise, one who apparently slid into a panel and got me denied a job last year. Kyle, while I do think you’re the best CEO for Cruise right now, you created some culture problems that have caused lasting effects. Focus on what customers want and let the engineers get their job done.
nebukadnet 5y ago
Don't you have a big problem with interference? I wouldn't trust a Lidar/radar based vision if there were 30 other cars waiting at an intersection. Yes, you can use multiple bands etc, but that's the advantage of using more passive sensors such as cameras. They work without synchronisation to the cars driving next to you.

spikels 5y ago

But obviously if it can be done with just cameras, that’s going to be the winning solution (cheaper, simpler, etc). Let’s try a diverse set of strategies and see which one wins in the real world. Nobody knows for sure at this point.

XCSme 5y ago

> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).

siddarthd2919 5y ago
No, not with edge cases detection. In the Lidar vs Camera context - Camera depth models have a lot of room to improve
jeffbee 5y ago
LOL no, not even remotely close. ML image classifiers will decide that an otter is a bicycle with some invisible (to humans) noise injected into the chroma. And that's state-of-the-art classifiers, which Tesla does not possess.
- XCSme 5y ago
  I am asking mostly because the image captchas are starting to be really tough for humans, but ML can easily detect cars, boats and road signs.
jowday 5y ago
> Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? On some benchmarks, AI models are better at very well defined tasks like image classification (“label this image from a set of 8 labels you’ve seen before”) or object detection (“draw a box around all instances of class X in this image, where X is a very narrowly defined class”) They’re not even close to being able to understand unscene examples and parse out their meaning in a larger context the way humans can. (“Recognize that this object in the road is a human riding some sort of bizarre unicycle he welded himself, then predict how he’s likely to move given the structure of his custom unicycle thing”) The bottleneck in AVs isn’t “perception” in the sense of image classification and object detection, it’s deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning.
- XCSme 5y ago
  In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be some extra input data to the ML model.
  - jowday 5y ago
    The sort of abstract reasoning I’m talking about is beyond the capabilities of any ML model that will run onboard a car - the “abstract reasoning” problem in AVs right now is solved primarily through HD mapping and remote assistance. LIDAR is useful for a ton of other reasons - ground truth depth, high visibility at night, great for localization - and can detect if something’s an obstacle or not without having seen it before (but false positives can be an issue). Broadly speaking, people who focus on Camera vs LiDAR are missing the mark and don’t understand that the real difference between big AV players and consumer cars is HD maps and remote support.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    LIDAR data contains highly accurate depth information, at which point you don't need the abstract reasoning nearly so much. You can at least do basic object tracking and collision prevention without it.
z2 5y ago
I've been out of it for a while, but my understanding is that humans are still better at video recognition and extracting high-level information from moving videos, while the state of the art CV still tends to focus on rapid frame-by-frame static classification, with some semblance of persistence and motion strung together at the end.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
There are certain tasks where the models can do better than certain kinds of human effort (e.g. can do better than a person who is tired from doing a thousand of these in a row, is paying very little attention, is spending very little time, and doesn't really care), but that hasn't translated into actually doing image recognition better than humans.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't going to work. They are an engineering company, and they will attempt to engineer their way out of the wrong decision (vision only) if they have to in order to deliver. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-radar-electric-cars/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-radar-e... [2] https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf (Page 3-4, rich point cloud data, improved velocity resolution from 60GHz sensors, looks a lot like the benefits you'd get from LIDAR)

wbl 5y ago
There's a word for engineers that program cars to break the law resulting in deaths, and one of the first law codes specifies the appropriate punishment. Tesla is not operating in a way any ethical engineer should tolerate.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900 million to the United States government in 2014 [1]. Tesla's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2]. Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... [2] https://tesladeaths.com/ https://tesladeaths.com/
  - jdlshore 5y ago
    Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.

bluGill 5y ago

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I come of the top of hills and trust there is nothing on the other side where I can't see until I'm over the top and it would be too late. Backup cameras have been very useful, and take away something I would have said a few years ago. The above is situations I know of offhand hand were my vision isn't up to the task yet I do anyway - because I don't really have other options. If other sensors can outdo me then I want them.

8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
i hope you at least slow down around blind bends and corners. that shit is scary. see people racing over such obstacles all the time. i assume there will instead be a crash or deer or corgi or child hiding behind every obstacle
epgui 5y ago
That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just because a human is at the wheel.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I don't think that was the parent's point. These things could be made safer with other detection technologies beyond plain cameras. A human driver can make a conscious, nuanced decision to make these "faith-based decisions", but a computer may not be able to. So perhaps it might just completely refuse to drive in those situations if all it has is a camera, but it can't see anything due to fog or terrain, even if it would be somewhat safe for a human to drive in that situation.
  - epgui 5y ago
    It's really not clear to me what gives a human the nearly-magical ability to make decisions that a computer could not possibly make. If anything, I think we've seen that computers are much better than humans at making decisions in an ever-expanding set of narrow contexts (eg.: chess, go, protein folding...). It's not so much a matter of "can a computer do it better", it's more a question of "when are we going to figure out how to break down the problem in a way that a computer can solve much better than a human".

sroussey 5y ago

And you can just shine a Q-beam at such a car.

judge2020 5y ago
You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier, and pretty much every lane-keeping system will follow them.
- _kuvn 5y ago
  > You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier To paraphrase XKCD [0] - if you want to cause accidents, there are other failure mechanisms that'd work on humans as well [0] https://xkcd.com/1958/ https://xkcd.com/1958/

ModernMech 5y ago

That's because Kyle competed with MIT in the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is where the architecture for the modern driverless car was battle tested. LIDAR was by far and away the enabling technology in those competitions. Every team that finished in the DUC had a Velodyne 64 LIDAR. They are that important. For whatever reason, Tesla has decided to eschew this hard-earned wisdom, have treated their customers and the general public as an extension of their corporate research lab and their customers and others have paid the price for it with their lives. During the DUC, contestants competed in an abandoned military base in the middle of the desert. In that environment, the vehicles were outfitted with all matter of flashing lights, emergency stop procedures, and all humans had to clear the area. That's what robot research was like in 2007. And our cars didn't have a verified track record of deaths! Little did we know at the time, we could've just held the DARPA Urban challenge in the middle of downtown SF. Apparently we wouldn't even have needed to inform the unwitting public that an experiment involving a 2 ton machine that has killed people in the past was taking place in their midst.

WWLink 5y ago

Don't forget, Tesla uses cheap 1280x960 cameras (citation needed - they may have upgraded)... pointing out a potentially dirty windshield.

ahmedalsudani 5y ago
Not sure about the resolution, but the sensor is rather large. Resolution isn't nearly as important as being able to see clearly in low light. Re: dirty windshield. Humans see through those, and we have windshield wipers if visibility is impeded. I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job.
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  > I'm still excited about the LIDAR possibilities but vision alone has done a remarkable job. Not for Tesla. So many interventions. So many situations where the car actively tries to kill the driver and pedestrians.
  - onethought 5y ago
    But it's not finished. Have you asked Cruise testers how many interventions they have had to do in equivalent drives as Tesla FSD Beta? It's strange to me that Tesla who are building this in the open are criticised for being dishonest. Meanwhile ALL the competitors are closed door private development and some how we should trust them more? In an industry that is known for deceitful behaviour.
    - waffle_maniac 5y ago
      > Last year, Waymo logged 29,945 autonomous miles between reported disengagements. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169984987942913 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169984987942913 > Cruise drove 41,719 miles in autonomous mode per disengagement. > Waymo drove 2.36 million miles autonomously with one accident that was the vehicle's fault. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1495801454111727616 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1495801454111727616

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judge2020 5y ago

The thing is that I can't find any examples of Tesla's vision only system in FSD Beta not detecting any objects - all the failures are on the 'driving AI' side, ie. it makes the bad decision to try to turn right into a cyclist despite the cyclist being displayed on the center screen[0]. 0: https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?s=20&t=pVxN3zpRF08l1B4gNhBIhw https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?...

jowday 5y ago
There are tons of examples of objects flickering in and out of existence, not being detected, warping in weird ways. This is one of the most recent tweets from a prominent Tesla reverse engineer with plenty of examples. https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923
- judge2020 5y ago
  That's still detection, even if it can't precisely map the edge of the semi while cars are moving by; sometimes what's on screen isn't representative of what actual bounds the car thinks is off-limits, as we can see here[0] where the model of the commercial truck clips the car's model on-screen. He seems to support this theory that the problem is mostly the brain of the car[1], at least regarding how lidar won't help with object detection in general. 0: https://youtu.be/ttvBZtqxlRo?t=630 https://youtu.be/ttvBZtqxlRo?t=630 1: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?s=20&t=_rsU_kXTky21P5RqNNHGdw https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?..., and auxiliarily: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?s=20&t=UIH7ehg0imsDYc1Qpku8Hg https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1497696259473391617?...

nbardy 5y ago

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the key for building model backbones that you can retrain for downstream tasks.

jowday 5y ago
I don’t think image+text pair models (E.G. CLIP) would be very useful for AV tasks. They’re not very good at fine-grained classification or counting the number of instances in a scene. Not even getting into latency or model size.
ironman1478 5y ago
How much of that camera data is labeled for distance measurement use cases?
- vardump 5y ago
  Because cars (generally) move, probably most of it. You can compare successive frames and make predictions.
  - ironman1478 5y ago
    I think Tesla actually used radar data to provide ground truth for this. So they don't even do that to generate ground truth. What happens if things have the same relative speed when doing the labeling? Or low light conditions? How do you account for per part variation in lens and sensor designs and how it messes with your predictions?
rhacker 5y ago
8+ responding distance dots that are much closer than they should be are already a STOP, APPLY BREAKS situation where not much ML is even needed. That's the beauty of LIDAR. It will save lives unlike Tesla's driving into obvious poles/truck booms mistaken for a statue of liberty in Nebraska.

kelnos 5y ago

I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on them are ugly as sin. That really doesn't jive with Tesla's brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range. Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.

madamelic 5y ago
> I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. I've always read it as Tesla trying to do a paradigm leap. It seems everyone in self-driving knows you can do it pretty well with a huge variety of sensors, but what if you got extremely good at only camera-based then added in the new sensors. Basically, if you can establish that the very worst case works, you can add in more sensors to go beyond that and have the cars become superhuman rather than having to depend on all sensors to consistently be working to have a safe vehicle.
- fieldcny 5y ago
  Just to state the obvious, that assumes other sensors are net additive. I’m not sure how valid an assumption that is, they could wind up just adding complexity and creating noise.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  You don't have to remove sensors to write code that way. And what if the best answer is being extremely good at lidar-only and then adding in cameras on top.
  - freshpots 5y ago
    They should still have radar to see through fog/rain but they abandoned it, as Green said: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496575861822267403 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496575861822267403 now is a terrible time to buy a new Tesla car. But I do realize not everybody can wait it out
  - 5y ago

jseliger 5y ago

This interview with MobileEye: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-with-mobileye-ceo-prof-amnon-shashua-the-future-of-autonomous-driving https://www.anandtech.com/show/17151/an-exclusive-interview-... says they're going to release hardware for level 4 autonomy by 2024 or 2025.

markstos 5y ago

Cars are already complex enough to make them vulnerable to global supply chain challenges. The more tech that's required to put a car on the road, the more challenged that manufacturer is going to be have enough inventory of all the components to actually ship cars. I agree that LIDAR is valuable and hope all these companies are all able make safe cars with their tech stacks.

blankley 5y ago

You may well be describing me, as a Seattle resident with a blue coat and a chocolate lab who currently has an upset stomach and is in need of many walks recently. We're working on the food/diet part, but your comment inspired me to buy a reflective arm band for myself. His harness is already a bit reflective. Anyway, thought it was funny and thanks for the sanity check/advice.

stainforth 5y ago

> cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale Is there some cost prohibitive licensing on it that affects adoption the way e-ink patents have limited product creation?

robinsoh 5y ago
> the way e-ink patents have limited product creation Such incredible confidence in that statement that there is not even a hint or need to offer up any evidence or anything at all. HN is amazing. Dunning Kruger rules here.
- glup 5y ago
  Note the question mark in the OP’s comment. Also, pretty sure the e-ink limitation is common knowledge on HN. Yep, HN is amazing.
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    You've misunderstood his sentence then if you think the question mark is justifying the e-ink claim about patents. And if you look at my comment history, you'll see that this repeated claim/statement about patents vs electrophoretic products is unsubstantiated and no one has been able to provide any factual support for it. I stand by my claim that HN seems to have a lot of Dunningites when it comes to electrophoretics.

crsnaway1234 5y ago

This story is getting front-paged less about the tech or business aspects and more about so many in YC feeling validation through this outcome. But Kyle’s announcement is pretty minimal because it’s really more of a handoff than a validation of the YC country club. Dan Amman’s original edict to Cruise was to Beat Uber. Uber was not just disruptive in 2016, but they really wanted everyone to feel the size of their ambition. E.g. they placed an order for 100,000 Mercedes S-Classes that ATG was going to then equip. Uber could raise billions easily, and they were culturally reckless, so the OEMs thought them a threat. When Dan Amman took over, his pay package showed he very much wanted to be a Silicon Valley billionaire (see S-1 docs) who saved GM. And he had history with Mary. To Kyle, Mary is much closer to a boss, but to Dan, Mary is more of a colleague. Fast forward to today and the self-driving landscape has changed a ton. Uber barfed all over themselves and COVID has changed the world. Dan Amman no longer had a case for making him a SV billionaire, and he never was able to fix Cruise’s culture problems* anyway. So the change makes a ton of sense, and I’m sure Dan will find some other way to become as rich as sama or Justin Kan. Dan has already done a ton for GM and he’s good at what he does. * I left Cruise a while ago and while Kyle hired a lot of good people, he also hired a ton of jerks. In some cases he did it personally. I have four different stalkers from Cruise, one who apparently slid into a panel and got me denied a job last year. Kyle, while I do think you’re the best CEO for Cruise right now, you created some culture problems that have caused lasting effects. Focus on what customers want and let the engineers get their job done.

nebukadnet 5y ago

Don't you have a big problem with interference? I wouldn't trust a Lidar/radar based vision if there were 30 other cars waiting at an intersection. Yes, you can use multiple bands etc, but that's the advantage of using more passive sensors such as cameras. They work without synchronisation to the cars driving next to you.