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The counterpoint goes something like this (not that I necessarily buy it, but this is what I infer to be Tesla's reasoning): 1) We're only going to fully "solv

by ff317 4y ago

The counterpoint goes something like this (not that I necessarily buy it, but this is what I infer to be Tesla's reasoning): 1) We're only going to fully "solve" self-driving with ML techniques to train deployed NNs; it can't be done purely in human-written deterministic code because the task is too complex. 2) Those NNs are only going to come up to the necessary levels of quality with a ton of very-real-world test miles. Various forms of "artificial" in-house testing and simulation can help in some ways, but without the real-world data you won't get anywhere. 3) Deploying cars into the real world (to gather the above) without some kind of safety driver doesn't seem like a great path either. There's no backup driver to take over and intervene / unstick the car, and so far driverless taxi fleet efforts have been fairly narrowly geofenced for safety, which decreases the scope of scenarios they even get data on vs the whole real-world driving experience. 4) Therefore, the best plan to acquire the data to train the networks is to use a ton of customers as safety drivers and let them test it widely on the real routes they drive. This is tricky and dangerous, but if it's not too dangerous and the outcome saves many lives over the coming years, it was worth it.

ivraatiems 4y ago
I could see something like this being their logic - maybe not with neural networks/machine learning specifically, but certainly "the only way to get to where we want to go is to do this". My counter-counter-point would be that there's plenty of other companies that are doing this more safely, and also that ends don't justify the means when those means involve killing pedestrians.
- kjksf 4y ago
  Those other companies are rapidly going bankrupt because the economics of doing it the non-Tesla way seem impossible. zoox was bought by Amazon for $1 billion, which seems a lot but it was the amount of money invested into company, so it was sold at cost to Amazon. argo.ai just shutdown. VW and Ford spent several billions of dollars on that. drive.ai shutdown and was acqui-hired by Apple for the car project that was reportedly just pushed to 2026 aurora is publicly traded and is on the ropes, reportedly trying to find a buyer before they run out of cash. We'll see how long GM and Google will be willing to put ~$2 billion a year into Cruise / Waymo. I don't see them generating significant revenue any time soon. Tesla and comma.ai have a model where they make money while making progress. Everyone else just burns unholy amounts of capital and that can last only so long.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    So we're arguing it's better to offer a FSD that crashes rather than go bankrupt because maybe one day it won't?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      It's worse than that in my reading; the argument is entirely neutral on crashes, the only metric of success presented is not going out of business!
    - kjksf 4y ago
      No, I'm arguing that Waymo, Cruise and others following similar strategy will go bankrupt before delivering a working product and Tesla / Comma.ai won't. As to crashes: the disengages part of your rebuttal is implied claim that Waymo / Cruise are perfectly safe. Which they are not. FSD have been deployed on 160 thousand cars. No fatalities so far. No major crashes. Cruise has 30 cars in San Francisco and you get this: > Driverless Cruise robotaxis stop working simultaneously, blocking San Francisco street > Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic for hours on this San Francisco street Another Cruise robotaxi stopped in the muni lane. Waymo car also stopped in the middle of the road. Neither FSD or Cruise or Waymo had fatalities. They all had cases of bad driving. This is not Safe-but-will-go-bankrupt vs. not-safe-but-won't-go-bankrupt. It's: both approaches are unsafe today but one has a path to becoming safe eventually and the other doesn't, if only because of economic realities of spending $2 billion a year without line of sight for going break even. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191045/cruise-robotaxis-driverless-roadblock-san-francisco https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191045/cruise-robotaxis-... https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/cruise-robotaxis-blocked-traffic-for-hours-on-this-san-francisco-street/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/cruise-robotaxis-blocked-t...
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        > As to crashes: the disengages part of your rebuttal is implied claim that Waymo / Cruise are perfectly safe. I didn't mean to suggest that. I was responding to your words here: > Tesla and comma.ai have a model where they make money while making progress. I'm saying that it's not OK for a car company to keep going with dangerous self driving just because it can afford to. > FSD have been deployed on 160 thousand cars. No fatalities so far. No major crashes. That doesn't seem to be the case[1]. Though now we're going to squabble about definitions of "major" and also how is this reporting happening. [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/elon-musk-said-no-self-driving-tesla-had-ever-crashed https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/elon-musk-...
uvdn7 4y ago
By this reasoning, shouldn't Tesla pay users instead to enable FSD and collect data for them?
- shagie 4y ago
  A tangent to that thought... "do you want people to be financially incentivized to get into novel situations to test situations where FSD was lacking data?" I recall Waze had some point system to help gather positioning / speed data for side roads that it would try to have you go get with icons... and those were just fake internet points.
- judge2020 4y ago
  It seems they're doing quite well on their financials by offering access to FSD as a subscription. The misconception here is that FSD is needed for them to collect data - they collect autopilot sensor data on all cars regardless of FSD or not.
bentcorner 4y ago
I feel like you could enable FSD for every Tesla car in a "backseat driver" mode and have it mirror actions the driver does (so it doesn't have control but you're running it to see what it would do, without acting on it), and you watch for any significant diversions. Any time FSD wanted to do something but the driver did something else could have been a real disengagement.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  I believe this is exactly how Comma trains OpenPilot.
- gretch 4y ago
  I don't think that would work due to "bad" drivers. We all drive differently than we know we should drive in certain circumstances (e.g. road is completely empty in the middle of rural new mexico) For example, you can imagine FSD would determine to go straight down a straight lane with no obstacles - that would be the correct behavior. Now imagine in real life the driver takes their hand off the wheel to adjust the radio or AC, and as a result the car drifts over and lightly cross the lane marker - this doesn't really matter because it's broad daylight and the driver can see there's nothing but sand and rocks for 2 miles all around them. What's the machine conclude?
  - sushisource 4y ago
    The theory would be that washes out in the noise. It's a simplification, but on average, most of the people most of the time are not doing that - why would it zone in on the rare case and apply that behavior?
    - gretch 4y ago
      Well zoning in on the rare cases is the difference between what we (as in society's collective technology, not tesla) have today and full reliable self-driving. Even in the anecdotes throughout the rest of the comment section, there's a lot of people that said "yeah I tried FSD for a limited period of time and it worked for me". Because we're not saying that taking FSD outside right now will kill you within 5 minutes. We're saying that even if it kills you 0.01% - that's pretty sketch. The general principle is that all of the drivers that have been recruited to be 'teachers' to the machine are not aware that they are training a machine. As a result, they are probably doing things that are not advisable to train on. This doesn't even just apply to machines - how you drive when you are teaching your teenage child is probably different than the things that you do on a regular basis as an experienced driver. If you are not aware that you actually teaching someone something, that's a dangerous set of circumstances.
lostmsu 4y ago
IMHO, if they are allowed to use the public as a guinea pig, the data they collect should be available for everyone.
ot 4y ago
The fact that the other companies which went with a more thoughtful roll-out, delaying the time to market, got a much better track record, is a strong counter-counter-point IMO.
- jlundberg 4y ago
  The thing is that Tesla FSD is trying to solve another problem than cars driving in geograhically limited areas. Thus comparing the disengagement rates does not make sense.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    If you don't count disengagements then what metric do you use? Because I'd guess a statistically significant portion of disengagements are likely accidents that would've happened--if not for human intervention. Which if we're calling it 'full' self driving suggests you shouldn't need to intervene at all.
doliveira 4y ago
Yeah, move and fast and break things, you can just do beta testing with live real human beings. That Tesla is even allowed to do it speaks volumes to the unchecked power Elon's influence yields.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
>4) Therefore, the best plan to acquire the data to train the networks is to use a ton of customers as safety drivers and let them test it widely on the real routes they drive. This is tricky and dangerous, but if it's not too dangerous and the outcome saves many lives over the coming years, it was worth it. Maybe you should use specifically trained test drivers, who are acutely aware of the limitations and know how to deal with them, not random people who have been told through intentional snake oil marketing by a billionaire with a god complex who needs to feed his ego that the car can drive itself. It's insane that governments allow these vehicles on the road. Also, that kind of the-end-justifies-the-means reasoning has lead to a lot of catastrophic developments in history. Let's not go there again.
- dcow 4y ago
  I appreciate being principled about ends not justifying the means. But in my experience this principle is not applied universally by people. It's cherry-picked as what amounts to a non-sequitur when deployed in a discussion. Don't get me wrong, I wish it were a universally held and enforced moral principle, but it's not. Anyway, the reality is that Teslas are safer than any other car on the market right now, despite the scary voodoo tech. So it seems in this case the means are also justified. If auto-pilot and FSD were causing more accidents than humans, we'd be having a different conversation about ends justifying means, I surely agree.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > Anyway, the reality is that Teslas are safer than any other car on the market right now, despite the scary voodoo tech. What data are you using to conclude that? Safer for Tesla drivers or others near and on roads?
- ff317 4y ago
  Ends-justifies-the-means reasoning has also lead to many of the innovative wonders we're all now relying on every day. While the customer test drivers aren't "trained", there was some caution in the approach. Customers had to opt-in to request beta-testing access, they had to pass a Safety Score system that grades their driving safety (same as car insurance apps, roughly) for a long period (in some cases many months!), etc. After going through those hoops, when they finally get the software for it, they're required to consent again. IIRC the text there includes things like: You are in control at all times, must keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road and intervene for safety, you are liable for anything that happens, this software can do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, etc. They also monitor for your hands on the wheel (via torque sensing) and use an in-cabin camera to monitor whether you're watching the road or looking at a cellphone, etc. These measures can be defeated with effort by unsafe idiots, but that's no different than the risks such unsafe idiots present when driving any car. With all of that in place, they've scaled up over a couple of years to 160K customer test pilots. Accidents happen, but there's no evidence the rate of them is anything to worry about. If anything, what evidence there is seems to point in the direction of FSDb test drivers being safer than average. However, they're supposedly removing the Safety Score part of the process Very Soon (likely in the next few weeks), but the rest of the warnings and mitigations should remain. --- meta stuff: There's a ton of money and a ton of ego pushing huge agendas in every direction when it comes to anything Elon-related, Tesla included, especially since the Twitter saga began and he started really going off the rails more. Almost anything you read on related topics, regardless of which "side" it's on, you have to question the motive to even begin to understand the underlying objective truth. I follow Tesla news a lot, and I'd say ~90% of all random internet news articles on these subjects (positive and negative) are mostly utter bullshit clickbait when they're not outright fraud, and they're designed to influence stock prices and/or buyer behaviors more than they provide useful information. When big money and big egos are in a war over something, objective truth on the Internet is a casualty. If you ignore all that line noise and look at the objective reality of the engineering parts though: it's pretty amazing beta software with a lot of future potential, and the testing has gone pretty smoothly in terms of safety. It could be many years before you'd let it chaffeur some elderly person on a pharmacy run as a robotaxi, but IMHO it's still a better bet than most of its competitors in the long game of fully-generalized self driving on the human-centric road networks we have today. As for Elon himself: clearly some of his behavior and viewpoints lately are both pretty objectively terrible. At least you can see it? How many executives from companies that built things we all relied on from the past few decades have really been any better? They've mostly been better at hiding it, while Elon puts it on full display. The world is what it is.

by ff317 4y ago

ivraatiems 4y ago

I could see something like this being their logic - maybe not with neural networks/machine learning specifically, but certainly "the only way to get to where we want to go is to do this". My counter-counter-point would be that there's plenty of other companies that are doing this more safely, and also that ends don't justify the means when those means involve killing pedestrians.

kjksf 4y ago
Those other companies are rapidly going bankrupt because the economics of doing it the non-Tesla way seem impossible. zoox was bought by Amazon for $1 billion, which seems a lot but it was the amount of money invested into company, so it was sold at cost to Amazon. argo.ai just shutdown. VW and Ford spent several billions of dollars on that. drive.ai shutdown and was acqui-hired by Apple for the car project that was reportedly just pushed to 2026 aurora is publicly traded and is on the ropes, reportedly trying to find a buyer before they run out of cash. We'll see how long GM and Google will be willing to put ~$2 billion a year into Cruise / Waymo. I don't see them generating significant revenue any time soon. Tesla and comma.ai have a model where they make money while making progress. Everyone else just burns unholy amounts of capital and that can last only so long.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  So we're arguing it's better to offer a FSD that crashes rather than go bankrupt because maybe one day it won't?
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    It's worse than that in my reading; the argument is entirely neutral on crashes, the only metric of success presented is not going out of business!
  - kjksf 4y ago
    No, I'm arguing that Waymo, Cruise and others following similar strategy will go bankrupt before delivering a working product and Tesla / Comma.ai won't. As to crashes: the disengages part of your rebuttal is implied claim that Waymo / Cruise are perfectly safe. Which they are not. FSD have been deployed on 160 thousand cars. No fatalities so far. No major crashes. Cruise has 30 cars in San Francisco and you get this: > Driverless Cruise robotaxis stop working simultaneously, blocking San Francisco street > Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic for hours on this San Francisco street Another Cruise robotaxi stopped in the muni lane. Waymo car also stopped in the middle of the road. Neither FSD or Cruise or Waymo had fatalities. They all had cases of bad driving. This is not Safe-but-will-go-bankrupt vs. not-safe-but-won't-go-bankrupt. It's: both approaches are unsafe today but one has a path to becoming safe eventually and the other doesn't, if only because of economic realities of spending $2 billion a year without line of sight for going break even. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191045/cruise-robotaxis-driverless-roadblock-san-francisco https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191045/cruise-robotaxis-... https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/cruise-robotaxis-blocked-traffic-for-hours-on-this-san-francisco-street/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/cruise-robotaxis-blocked-t...
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      > As to crashes: the disengages part of your rebuttal is implied claim that Waymo / Cruise are perfectly safe. I didn't mean to suggest that. I was responding to your words here: > Tesla and comma.ai have a model where they make money while making progress. I'm saying that it's not OK for a car company to keep going with dangerous self driving just because it can afford to. > FSD have been deployed on 160 thousand cars. No fatalities so far. No major crashes. That doesn't seem to be the case[1]. Though now we're going to squabble about definitions of "major" and also how is this reporting happening. [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/elon-musk-said-no-self-driving-tesla-had-ever-crashed https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-07-14/elon-musk-...

uvdn7 4y ago

By this reasoning, shouldn't Tesla pay users instead to enable FSD and collect data for them?

shagie 4y ago
A tangent to that thought... "do you want people to be financially incentivized to get into novel situations to test situations where FSD was lacking data?" I recall Waze had some point system to help gather positioning / speed data for side roads that it would try to have you go get with icons... and those were just fake internet points.
judge2020 4y ago
It seems they're doing quite well on their financials by offering access to FSD as a subscription. The misconception here is that FSD is needed for them to collect data - they collect autopilot sensor data on all cars regardless of FSD or not.

bentcorner 4y ago

I feel like you could enable FSD for every Tesla car in a "backseat driver" mode and have it mirror actions the driver does (so it doesn't have control but you're running it to see what it would do, without acting on it), and you watch for any significant diversions. Any time FSD wanted to do something but the driver did something else could have been a real disengagement.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
I believe this is exactly how Comma trains OpenPilot.
gretch 4y ago
I don't think that would work due to "bad" drivers. We all drive differently than we know we should drive in certain circumstances (e.g. road is completely empty in the middle of rural new mexico) For example, you can imagine FSD would determine to go straight down a straight lane with no obstacles - that would be the correct behavior. Now imagine in real life the driver takes their hand off the wheel to adjust the radio or AC, and as a result the car drifts over and lightly cross the lane marker - this doesn't really matter because it's broad daylight and the driver can see there's nothing but sand and rocks for 2 miles all around them. What's the machine conclude?
- sushisource 4y ago
  The theory would be that washes out in the noise. It's a simplification, but on average, most of the people most of the time are not doing that - why would it zone in on the rare case and apply that behavior?
  - gretch 4y ago
    Well zoning in on the rare cases is the difference between what we (as in society's collective technology, not tesla) have today and full reliable self-driving. Even in the anecdotes throughout the rest of the comment section, there's a lot of people that said "yeah I tried FSD for a limited period of time and it worked for me". Because we're not saying that taking FSD outside right now will kill you within 5 minutes. We're saying that even if it kills you 0.01% - that's pretty sketch. The general principle is that all of the drivers that have been recruited to be 'teachers' to the machine are not aware that they are training a machine. As a result, they are probably doing things that are not advisable to train on. This doesn't even just apply to machines - how you drive when you are teaching your teenage child is probably different than the things that you do on a regular basis as an experienced driver. If you are not aware that you actually teaching someone something, that's a dangerous set of circumstances.

lostmsu 4y ago

IMHO, if they are allowed to use the public as a guinea pig, the data they collect should be available for everyone.

ot 4y ago

The fact that the other companies which went with a more thoughtful roll-out, delaying the time to market, got a much better track record, is a strong counter-counter-point IMO.

jlundberg 4y ago
The thing is that Tesla FSD is trying to solve another problem than cars driving in geograhically limited areas. Thus comparing the disengagement rates does not make sense.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  If you don't count disengagements then what metric do you use? Because I'd guess a statistically significant portion of disengagements are likely accidents that would've happened--if not for human intervention. Which if we're calling it 'full' self driving suggests you shouldn't need to intervene at all.

doliveira 4y ago

Yeah, move and fast and break things, you can just do beta testing with live real human beings. That Tesla is even allowed to do it speaks volumes to the unchecked power Elon's influence yields.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

>4) Therefore, the best plan to acquire the data to train the networks is to use a ton of customers as safety drivers and let them test it widely on the real routes they drive. This is tricky and dangerous, but if it's not too dangerous and the outcome saves many lives over the coming years, it was worth it. Maybe you should use specifically trained test drivers, who are acutely aware of the limitations and know how to deal with them, not random people who have been told through intentional snake oil marketing by a billionaire with a god complex who needs to feed his ego that the car can drive itself. It's insane that governments allow these vehicles on the road. Also, that kind of the-end-justifies-the-means reasoning has lead to a lot of catastrophic developments in history. Let's not go there again.

dcow 4y ago
I appreciate being principled about ends not justifying the means. But in my experience this principle is not applied universally by people. It's cherry-picked as what amounts to a non-sequitur when deployed in a discussion. Don't get me wrong, I wish it were a universally held and enforced moral principle, but it's not. Anyway, the reality is that Teslas are safer than any other car on the market right now, despite the scary voodoo tech. So it seems in this case the means are also justified. If auto-pilot and FSD were causing more accidents than humans, we'd be having a different conversation about ends justifying means, I surely agree.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > Anyway, the reality is that Teslas are safer than any other car on the market right now, despite the scary voodoo tech. What data are you using to conclude that? Safer for Tesla drivers or others near and on roads?
ff317 4y ago
Ends-justifies-the-means reasoning has also lead to many of the innovative wonders we're all now relying on every day. While the customer test drivers aren't "trained", there was some caution in the approach. Customers had to opt-in to request beta-testing access, they had to pass a Safety Score system that grades their driving safety (same as car insurance apps, roughly) for a long period (in some cases many months!), etc. After going through those hoops, when they finally get the software for it, they're required to consent again. IIRC the text there includes things like: You are in control at all times, must keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road and intervene for safety, you are liable for anything that happens, this software can do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, etc. They also monitor for your hands on the wheel (via torque sensing) and use an in-cabin camera to monitor whether you're watching the road or looking at a cellphone, etc. These measures can be defeated with effort by unsafe idiots, but that's no different than the risks such unsafe idiots present when driving any car. With all of that in place, they've scaled up over a couple of years to 160K customer test pilots. Accidents happen, but there's no evidence the rate of them is anything to worry about. If anything, what evidence there is seems to point in the direction of FSDb test drivers being safer than average. However, they're supposedly removing the Safety Score part of the process Very Soon (likely in the next few weeks), but the rest of the warnings and mitigations should remain. --- meta stuff: There's a ton of money and a ton of ego pushing huge agendas in every direction when it comes to anything Elon-related, Tesla included, especially since the Twitter saga began and he started really going off the rails more. Almost anything you read on related topics, regardless of which "side" it's on, you have to question the motive to even begin to understand the underlying objective truth. I follow Tesla news a lot, and I'd say ~90% of all random internet news articles on these subjects (positive and negative) are mostly utter bullshit clickbait when they're not outright fraud, and they're designed to influence stock prices and/or buyer behaviors more than they provide useful information. When big money and big egos are in a war over something, objective truth on the Internet is a casualty. If you ignore all that line noise and look at the objective reality of the engineering parts though: it's pretty amazing beta software with a lot of future potential, and the testing has gone pretty smoothly in terms of safety. It could be many years before you'd let it chaffeur some elderly person on a pharmacy run as a robotaxi, but IMHO it's still a better bet than most of its competitors in the long game of fully-generalized self driving on the human-centric road networks we have today. As for Elon himself: clearly some of his behavior and viewpoints lately are both pretty objectively terrible. At least you can see it? How many executives from companies that built things we all relied on from the past few decades have really been any better? They've mostly been better at hiding it, while Elon puts it on full display. The world is what it is.