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Waymo has superior performance based on their historical statistics. It makes sense, since their lidar sensors capture more of the environment, and directly in

Waymo has superior performance based on their historical statistics. It makes sense, since their lidar sensors capture more of the environment, and directly in 3D. Their AI also seems better QA’ed. The Tesla AI Day[0] surprised me as it showed they only had a simple architecture for a very long time, simply feeding barely processed camera pixels to a DNN and hoping for the best with little more than supervised learning off human feeds. Their big claim to glory was that they rearchitectured it to produce a 2D map of the environment… which I thought they had years ago, and is still a far cry from the 3D modeling that is needed. After all, sure, we humans only take two video feeds as input… But we can appreciate from it the position, intent, and trajectory of a wealth of elements around us, with reasonable probability estimates for multiple possibilities, sometimes pertaining to things that are invisible, such as kids crossing from nowhere when near a school. Cruise also seems to have better tech; they had a barely-watched 2h30 description of their systems[1] which shows they do create a richer environment, evaluate the routing of many objects, and train their systems on a very realistic simulation, not just supervised training, which means it can learn from very low-probability events. They have a whole segment on including the probability that unseen cars may travel from perpendicular roads; Tesla’s creeping hit-or-miss are well-documented on Youtube. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJWN0K26NxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJWN0K26NxQ

giantrobot 4y ago
> After all, sure, we humans only take two video feeds as input… No, we use both our perception and proprioception when we drive or walk for that matter. We have two accute visual sensors mounted in a housing with six degrees of freedom and a sensor feedback mechanism. We also have fairly sensitive motion and momentum sensors all throughout our bodies. Additionally we have audio sensors feeding into our positional model. All this data is fed into an advanced computing system that can trivially separate out sensor noise from useful signal. The computing system controls the vehicle, navigates, and even performs low priority background tasks like wondering if the front door of the house was locked. We have dozens of integrated sensor inputs. It's just silly to assume we only use our eyes when driving. They're certainly an important sensor for driving but definitely not the only one.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  All the vision-only maximalists also ignore how insufficient Tesla cameras are compared to your human eyes in terms of resolution, dynamic range and refresh rates. If you ever review your Tesla Dashcam footage you'll see that you can rarely even make out a license plate. The cameras are not even HD, let alone UHD. Further the refresh rate is a paltry 36fps. Drive the car at high noon or night and you realize how poor the dynamic range is with highlights and/or shadows get lost.

giantrobot 4y ago

> After all, sure, we humans only take two video feeds as input… No, we use both our perception and proprioception when we drive or walk for that matter. We have two accute visual sensors mounted in a housing with six degrees of freedom and a sensor feedback mechanism. We also have fairly sensitive motion and momentum sensors all throughout our bodies. Additionally we have audio sensors feeding into our positional model. All this data is fed into an advanced computing system that can trivially separate out sensor noise from useful signal. The computing system controls the vehicle, navigates, and even performs low priority background tasks like wondering if the front door of the house was locked. We have dozens of integrated sensor inputs. It's just silly to assume we only use our eyes when driving. They're certainly an important sensor for driving but definitely not the only one.

steveBK123 4y ago
All the vision-only maximalists also ignore how insufficient Tesla cameras are compared to your human eyes in terms of resolution, dynamic range and refresh rates. If you ever review your Tesla Dashcam footage you'll see that you can rarely even make out a license plate. The cameras are not even HD, let alone UHD. Further the refresh rate is a paltry 36fps. Drive the car at high noon or night and you realize how poor the dynamic range is with highlights and/or shadows get lost.