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That was hilarious. Basically (unless this needs a reframing/realignment/repositioning/reorienting): Q: "are less sensors less safe/effective?" A: "well more

That was hilarious. Basically (unless this needs a reframing/realignment/repositioning/reorienting): Q: "are less sensors less safe/effective?" A: "well more sensors are costly to the organization and add more tech debt so safety is orthogonal and not worth answering".

Retric 4y ago
The video has a more reasonable answer. The sensors are unreliable and expensive in terms of R&D. Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. “They contribute noise and entropy into everything.” … “you’re investing fully into that [vision] and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the system.” His standpoint can be summed up as “I think some of the other companies are going to drop it.” Which would be really interesting if true.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. "Less sensors can be more safe/effective if that allows us to focus on making effective use of the sensor information we do have, which is the result we're aiming for with this descision." would be a reasonable answer (if true), but that doesn't seem like a fair interpretation of what he actually said.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It’s fairly rambling but he touches on that exact point several times most specifically here at the 2 minute mark: “Organizationally it can be very distracting. If all you want to get to work is vision resources are on it and you’re actually making forward progress. That is the sensor with the most bandwidth the most constraints and you’re investing fully into that and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the system.” Which was from this section: Q: “Is it more bloat in the data engine?” “100%” (Q:“is it a distraction?”) “These sensors can change over time.” “Suddenly you need to worry about it. And they will have different distributions. They contribute noise and entropy into everything and they bloat stuff”. Even earlier he says: “These sensors aren’t free…” list of reasons including “you have to fuse them into the system in some way. So that like bloats the organization” “The cost is high and you’re not particularly seeing it if your just a computer vision engineer and I am just trying to improve my network.”
  - dmix 4y ago
    Isn’t that his point though? Where exactly is he not saying that? I listened to his answer three times and I’m not able to come up with a different interpretation than that.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Isn’t that his point though? Where exactly is he not saying that? Andrej eventually gets to it. But his first response was to evade. Lex is a skilled interviewer. By not letting him wriggle out of a difficult question we eventually got a substantive answer. But Andrej's first instinct was to evade. That's notable.
      - dmix 4y ago
        I don't agree Lex is a skilled interviewer, he's great at creating interesting conversations in the aw-shucks way Joe Rogan is, but he mostly plays a fanboy role. I still love a Lex interview. Otherwise I agree.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > don't agree Lex is a skill interviewer Fair enough. Seemingly practiced may be a better description. (I'm not super familiar with his work.)
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    That was exactly his point. I listened earlier today. (It being his point doesn’t mean he is necessarily right.)
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  Didn't they used to talk about how the Tesla radar could actually see the reflections of the car ahead of the one just in front of you? i.e. the radar reflection bouncing underneath the car just in front of you? This is what doesn't add up to me. Either a lot of that previous wonder-talk was actually a lie, or there's something else going on here.
  - hello639 4y ago
    > Either a lot of that previous wonder-talk was actually a lie, or there's something else going on here. Tesla dropped radar and ultrasonic due to supply shortages. Nothing to do with their AI being smart. Many first-hand reports on Tesla fanboy forums on how no-radar and no-ultrasonic autopilot is far worse than with the sensors.
aeternum 4y ago
Lack of focus is a major problem for companies and we all know that tech debt leads to increased bug counts. Team focus on vision which is by far the highest accuracy and bandwidth sensor allows for a faster rate of safety innovation given a constant team size.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Tesla engineers are currently doing post-commit review of Twitter source code. Focus is the last thing I would credit them with.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    All of them?
  - jfabre 4y ago
    do you have data to back this claim?
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Have you been keeping up with the Twitter deal? This was covered Friday. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-engineers-visit-twitter-office-to-review-code-for-musk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng... And the corresponding HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365065
      - jfabre 4y ago
        I have not been following the whole thing super closely, no. Thank you for the links.
  - eigenrick 4y ago
    I don't think it was your intent, but your statement makes it seems like all Tesla engineers are looking at Twitter code. I bet this number is closer to 4. Tesla has ca. 1000 software engineers working in various capacities. The ca. 300 that work on car firmware and autonomous driving are probably not participating in the Twitter drama.
judge2020 4y ago
Munro’s cost breakdown is much more informative in just how much it’ll save in terms of parts/labor. https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE In general the ‘harm to consumers’ is really just making it more likely they damage the car in a parking lot or their garage, which tells you where their priorities are (sales, Automotive gross profit). Assuming occupancy network works, the only real blind spot left is if something in front of the car changes in between it turning off and on (assuming occupancy will 'remember' the map around it when it goes to sleep). Also, Tesla’s strategy for safety is seemingly “excel in industry standard tests, ie. IIHS and EuroNCAP”, so this might be a case of the measure becoming a target.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  This thread is unhelpfully mixing radar and ultrasonic sensors. Ultrasonic sensors, as your video explains, are primarily used as a parking aid; they are tuned for too low a distance to be helpful in just about any kind of driving scenario at speed. Meanwhile, radar is the principal sensor used in systems like automatic emergency braking across the industry. It has no intersection with any of the parking stuff because it generally has to ignore stationary objects to be useful (hence the whole "Teslas crashing full speed into stopped vehicles" thing).
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    The first famous autopilot crash was because a white semi-truck was washed out by the sun and confused for an overhead sign. That's literally trivial for a car with radar to detect. Amazing how people talk about stuff they have no idea about when it comes to Tesla.
    - eightysixfour 4y ago
      Not a fan of Tesla removing the sensors but a vehicle on a highway that isn’t moving the same direction as the car is not “trivial” with radar. No AEBs that use radar look for completely stopped objects after a certain speed because the number of false positives is so high.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
It is a hard question to answer. It’s like asking if more programmers on a project will allow it to be completed faster with higher quality. Ya, theoretically they could, in practice not likely. More sensors are like more programmers, theoretically they can be safer and more effective, but in practice they won’t be. Sensor fusion is as hard a problem as scaling up a software team.
- atoav 4y ago
  I mean yeah, but it is a friggin ton heavy object moving at high speed controlled by a computer. Having another kind of sensor system to cross-check might be the reasonable thing to have, even if you happen to make it work well in 99% of the cases just with optics — the issue is that the other 1% kill people. Your optical system can be good as heck till a bug hits it directly on the lense coving an important frontal area and make it behave weirdly.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  It is not a hard question to answer at all. LIDAR will make a self driving car safer, period. There is a lot of research to back this up.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    LIDAR can be safer than an optical system, I can believe that. LIDAR and an optical system being safer than either alone without a lot of extra complexity: maybe not.
- underwater 4y ago
  Not more sensors, different sensors. In your metaphor it's like asking if you should have project managers as well as engineers on your project. And Tesla has decided that having only engineers allows them to focusing on having the best engineers. And they avoid the distraction of having to manage different types of employees.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
jholman 4y ago
Uh, that's not at all a good paraphrase. Q: "Does [removing some sensors] make the perception problem harder, or easier?" (note, this is literally what Lex asked, your restatement is misleading) A: [paraphrasing] "Well more sensor diversity makes it harder to focus on the thing that I believe really moves the needle, so by narrowing the space of consideration, I think we'll get better results" Karpathy might not be telling the truth, I don't know. But it's a much more credible pitch than you make it sound, because it's often true that you can deliver better by focusing on a smaller number of things. Engineering has always been about tradeoffs. Nobody is offering Karpathy infinite money plus infinite resources plus infinite time to do the job. Again, I'm not saying Karpathy is honest or correct. I'm saying that the rephrasings in this comment and this thread are hilariously unfair.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  Actually that's a fair point. My goal was only for simplification and not intended to malign.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  It is definitely a clever marketing pitch, as there is plenty of evidence to back up that LIDAR makes self-driving cars significantly safer. However, despite the hype, Teslas aren't really self driving cars at the moment, so it seems an acceptable commercial decision wrapped up in a clever sales pitch.
  - gizmo 4y ago
    That's also true for high resolution maps. The question is whether you're solving for self-driving on highways or a handful of mapped city centers or whether you want to solve for the real thing. Tesla is all-in on FULL self driving, and most other companies are betting on driver assistance or gps-locked self-driving. If Tesla can get FSD to work in the next couple of years then they're vindicated. If FSD requires a weak form of generalized intelligence (plausible) then FSD isn't happening anytime soon and investing in more sensors and GPS maps is correct.
    - 4y ago

Retric 4y ago

The video has a more reasonable answer. The sensors are unreliable and expensive in terms of R&D. Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. “They contribute noise and entropy into everything.” … “you’re investing fully into that [vision] and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the system.” His standpoint can be summed up as “I think some of the other companies are going to drop it.” Which would be really interesting if true.

a1369209993 4y ago
> Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. "Less sensors can be more safe/effective if that allows us to focus on making effective use of the sensor information we do have, which is the result we're aiming for with this descision." would be a reasonable answer (if true), but that doesn't seem like a fair interpretation of what he actually said.
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s fairly rambling but he touches on that exact point several times most specifically here at the 2 minute mark: “Organizationally it can be very distracting. If all you want to get to work is vision resources are on it and you’re actually making forward progress. That is the sensor with the most bandwidth the most constraints and you’re investing fully into that and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the system.” Which was from this section: Q: “Is it more bloat in the data engine?” “100%” (Q:“is it a distraction?”) “These sensors can change over time.” “Suddenly you need to worry about it. And they will have different distributions. They contribute noise and entropy into everything and they bloat stuff”. Even earlier he says: “These sensors aren’t free…” list of reasons including “you have to fuse them into the system in some way. So that like bloats the organization” “The cost is high and you’re not particularly seeing it if your just a computer vision engineer and I am just trying to improve my network.”
- dmix 4y ago
  Isn’t that his point though? Where exactly is he not saying that? I listened to his answer three times and I’m not able to come up with a different interpretation than that.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Isn’t that his point though? Where exactly is he not saying that? Andrej eventually gets to it. But his first response was to evade. Lex is a skilled interviewer. By not letting him wriggle out of a difficult question we eventually got a substantive answer. But Andrej's first instinct was to evade. That's notable.
    - dmix 4y ago
      I don't agree Lex is a skilled interviewer, he's great at creating interesting conversations in the aw-shucks way Joe Rogan is, but he mostly plays a fanboy role. I still love a Lex interview. Otherwise I agree.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > don't agree Lex is a skill interviewer Fair enough. Seemingly practiced may be a better description. (I'm not super familiar with his work.)
- 1123581321 4y ago
  That was exactly his point. I listened earlier today. (It being his point doesn’t mean he is necessarily right.)
lambdasquirrel 4y ago
Didn't they used to talk about how the Tesla radar could actually see the reflections of the car ahead of the one just in front of you? i.e. the radar reflection bouncing underneath the car just in front of you? This is what doesn't add up to me. Either a lot of that previous wonder-talk was actually a lie, or there's something else going on here.
- hello639 4y ago
  > Either a lot of that previous wonder-talk was actually a lie, or there's something else going on here. Tesla dropped radar and ultrasonic due to supply shortages. Nothing to do with their AI being smart. Many first-hand reports on Tesla fanboy forums on how no-radar and no-ultrasonic autopilot is far worse than with the sensors.

aeternum 4y ago

Lack of focus is a major problem for companies and we all know that tech debt leads to increased bug counts. Team focus on vision which is by far the highest accuracy and bandwidth sensor allows for a faster rate of safety innovation given a constant team size.

jeffbee 4y ago
Tesla engineers are currently doing post-commit review of Twitter source code. Focus is the last thing I would credit them with.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  All of them?
- jfabre 4y ago
  do you have data to back this claim?
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Have you been keeping up with the Twitter deal? This was covered Friday. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-engineers-visit-twitter-office-to-review-code-for-musk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng... And the corresponding HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365065
    - jfabre 4y ago
      I have not been following the whole thing super closely, no. Thank you for the links.
- eigenrick 4y ago
  I don't think it was your intent, but your statement makes it seems like all Tesla engineers are looking at Twitter code. I bet this number is closer to 4. Tesla has ca. 1000 software engineers working in various capacities. The ca. 300 that work on car firmware and autonomous driving are probably not participating in the Twitter drama.

judge2020 4y ago

Munro’s cost breakdown is much more informative in just how much it’ll save in terms of parts/labor. https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE In general the ‘harm to consumers’ is really just making it more likely they damage the car in a parking lot or their garage, which tells you where their priorities are (sales, Automotive gross profit). Assuming occupancy network works, the only real blind spot left is if something in front of the car changes in between it turning off and on (assuming occupancy will 'remember' the map around it when it goes to sleep). Also, Tesla’s strategy for safety is seemingly “excel in industry standard tests, ie. IIHS and EuroNCAP”, so this might be a case of the measure becoming a target.

stefan_ 4y ago
This thread is unhelpfully mixing radar and ultrasonic sensors. Ultrasonic sensors, as your video explains, are primarily used as a parking aid; they are tuned for too low a distance to be helpful in just about any kind of driving scenario at speed. Meanwhile, radar is the principal sensor used in systems like automatic emergency braking across the industry. It has no intersection with any of the parking stuff because it generally has to ignore stationary objects to be useful (hence the whole "Teslas crashing full speed into stopped vehicles" thing).
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  The first famous autopilot crash was because a white semi-truck was washed out by the sun and confused for an overhead sign. That's literally trivial for a car with radar to detect. Amazing how people talk about stuff they have no idea about when it comes to Tesla.
  - eightysixfour 4y ago
    Not a fan of Tesla removing the sensors but a vehicle on a highway that isn’t moving the same direction as the car is not “trivial” with radar. No AEBs that use radar look for completely stopped objects after a certain speed because the number of false positives is so high.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

It is a hard question to answer. It’s like asking if more programmers on a project will allow it to be completed faster with higher quality. Ya, theoretically they could, in practice not likely. More sensors are like more programmers, theoretically they can be safer and more effective, but in practice they won’t be. Sensor fusion is as hard a problem as scaling up a software team.

atoav 4y ago
I mean yeah, but it is a friggin ton heavy object moving at high speed controlled by a computer. Having another kind of sensor system to cross-check might be the reasonable thing to have, even if you happen to make it work well in 99% of the cases just with optics — the issue is that the other 1% kill people. Your optical system can be good as heck till a bug hits it directly on the lense coving an important frontal area and make it behave weirdly.
oxfordmale 4y ago
It is not a hard question to answer at all. LIDAR will make a self driving car safer, period. There is a lot of research to back this up.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  LIDAR can be safer than an optical system, I can believe that. LIDAR and an optical system being safer than either alone without a lot of extra complexity: maybe not.
underwater 4y ago
Not more sensors, different sensors. In your metaphor it's like asking if you should have project managers as well as engineers on your project. And Tesla has decided that having only engineers allows them to focusing on having the best engineers. And they avoid the distraction of having to manage different types of employees.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago

jholman 4y ago

Uh, that's not at all a good paraphrase. Q: "Does [removing some sensors] make the perception problem harder, or easier?" (note, this is literally what Lex asked, your restatement is misleading) A: [paraphrasing] "Well more sensor diversity makes it harder to focus on the thing that I believe really moves the needle, so by narrowing the space of consideration, I think we'll get better results" Karpathy might not be telling the truth, I don't know. But it's a much more credible pitch than you make it sound, because it's often true that you can deliver better by focusing on a smaller number of things. Engineering has always been about tradeoffs. Nobody is offering Karpathy infinite money plus infinite resources plus infinite time to do the job. Again, I'm not saying Karpathy is honest or correct. I'm saying that the rephrasings in this comment and this thread are hilariously unfair.

flashgordon 4y ago
Actually that's a fair point. My goal was only for simplification and not intended to malign.
oxfordmale 4y ago
It is definitely a clever marketing pitch, as there is plenty of evidence to back up that LIDAR makes self-driving cars significantly safer. However, despite the hype, Teslas aren't really self driving cars at the moment, so it seems an acceptable commercial decision wrapped up in a clever sales pitch.
- gizmo 4y ago
  That's also true for high resolution maps. The question is whether you're solving for self-driving on highways or a handful of mapped city centers or whether you want to solve for the real thing. Tesla is all-in on FULL self driving, and most other companies are betting on driver assistance or gps-locked self-driving. If Tesla can get FSD to work in the next couple of years then they're vindicated. If FSD requires a weak form of generalized intelligence (plausible) then FSD isn't happening anytime soon and investing in more sensors and GPS maps is correct.
  - 4y ago