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Tesla's approach has always been the least credible of the self-driving companies: they seemed to belive that if you just iterate on driver assist enough you ge

Tesla's approach has always been the least credible of the self-driving companies: they seemed to belive that if you just iterate on driver assist enough you get self-driving, and they seemed to want to make the system work on far more constrained hardware than their competition (because they were for some reason aiming at selling direct to consumers, which is not a particularly good business strategy for self-driving. A cynic would suggest it was vaporware for marketing all along). Other groups working on the problem (especially Waymo) seemed to actually grok that this is by far the most complex safety-critical system ever envisioned and approached the problem accordingly (with a lot of caution, laying of groundwork, a plan to roll out the system gradually, and bulding the it from the ground up to work on its own, not as a driver assist).

carlivar 4y ago
When Tesla got rid of radar and switched to "vision only" I cynically assumed it was a way to compensate for supply chain issues rather than radar being as useless as Musk was saying. I still think this is a possibility.
- rcxdude 4y ago
  It's also possible their radar was functionally useless: while it gave good range information it had poor angular resolution, a fact which seemed to contribute to Autopilot's issue with recognising stationary obstacles. it's worth keeping in mind that LIDAR gives much higher quality data than low-cost radar. (It also doesn't follow that if their radar was useless that vision alone would be good enough)
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    That might have made more sense to me if they hadn't followed it up by removing their ultrasonic sensors, which were functionally quite useful, since without them the car cannot see things at low speeds that are below the plane visible from the front-facing camera mounted opposite the rear view mirror.
  - WirelessGigabit 4y ago
    Except cameras don't work in low-vis situations. Their range is shorter. In fact, when Tesla removed the radar their max-speed with self-driving (or what is it called) dropped from 80mph to 75mph. What's worse is that they disabled the radar for everybody. How is that not a class action? You're losing features.
- Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
  The argument from Andrej Karpathy is that humans use vision and vision alone, so if we can learn to drive by vision, then so should an ML model. A radar is a sensor a human doesn't have, but we can gauge distance, and they also do introduce potential supply chain issues. So limiting the number of sensors is beneficial there. He also makes the argument that you have a tonne of data already. 8 1.2mp cameras, so 9.6 million pixels or effectively 9.6 million separate data points used to train the model. When you have that much data, what does including some relatively low resolution radar information give you that you couldn't infer from vision? I don't know enough about AI to know if he's right, but it makes some sense to me. I think my biggest issue with it is that human eyes are insanely high quality, able to adapt to huge changes in light levels and clean themselves every few seconds. I know Teslas have issues with cameras being blocked by sunlight and things like that. A human can just move their head and use the sun visor. With my limited knowledge I think vision probably is the ultimate way forward, but maybe they're too early. Perhaps there's some breakthrough we need to simplify the problem. I don't think Tesla will be the first to start making money from autonomous vehicles. I think Waymo will be the first. LIDAR isn't scalable but it simplifies a big part of the problem to the point that you can generate revenue from autonomous taxis while you train and perfect the general purpose vision model in the long term.
  - philjohn 4y ago
    It doesn't make sense to me at all. We have an iris, this allows us to limit the amount of light hitting our retina, or increase it when conditions are darker. Do the cameras on a Tesla have shutters that can do this? Otherwise you're going to have fun when there is glare off a wet road.
    - Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
      Did you even read my comment?
  - klondike_ 4y ago
    The issue is that self driving needs to be better than human drivers by a considerable margin. The public will not tolerate an AI driver that makes the same mistakes as humans, they expect better. To do this it will need access to sensors that humans don't have
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It is certainly possible to make a self-driving system with vision alone. But it is also extremely likely that this is much harder than doing it with radar and lidar added to vision. Since nobody knows how to do any of them yet, you can't expect the company trying to solve the much harder problem to be one of the first to get it. Their communication is a constant denial of this fact. So they either have no idea what they are doing, or are lying through their teeth.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  I think it sounds like Musk looked at humans and went "we do fine with just vision, so make the computer do it with just vision, that has to be good enough" Which underappreciates the fact that it is such a hard problem (nature had 500M years to iterate on the reference design) that you want to cheat as hard as possible by giving yourself the best sensor information you can.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Automatic cars need to be better drivers than us, not just good enough, as another thing.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      If they were as good as the average sober and undistracted human they'd probably be a massive improvement. But yeah, they need to hit the highest bar possible. As we've seen with vaccines anything developed by humans has to be nearly perfect, while a "natural" massive clusterfuck with 40,000 deaths per year won't count for anything by comparison.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        > If they were as good as the average sober and undistracted human they'd probably be a massive improvement. How do you convince the better half of drivers that they should use a system that is worse than themselves, personally?
        lamontcg 4y ago
        If you had a system that drove roughly as well as I do at my 90% best and cut out the worst 10% of my driving, and let me not have to deal with the road that'd be fine for me. And I probably should have said "sober, undistracted and competent human" since some people just shouldn't drive, and some people shouldn't be driving under certain conditions (which may not be tired or drunk, but going through a rough break up with late night emotional blowups).
  - deleted 4y ago

carlivar 4y ago

When Tesla got rid of radar and switched to "vision only" I cynically assumed it was a way to compensate for supply chain issues rather than radar being as useless as Musk was saying. I still think this is a possibility.

rcxdude 4y ago
It's also possible their radar was functionally useless: while it gave good range information it had poor angular resolution, a fact which seemed to contribute to Autopilot's issue with recognising stationary obstacles. it's worth keeping in mind that LIDAR gives much higher quality data than low-cost radar. (It also doesn't follow that if their radar was useless that vision alone would be good enough)
- akerl_ 4y ago
  That might have made more sense to me if they hadn't followed it up by removing their ultrasonic sensors, which were functionally quite useful, since without them the car cannot see things at low speeds that are below the plane visible from the front-facing camera mounted opposite the rear view mirror.
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Except cameras don't work in low-vis situations. Their range is shorter. In fact, when Tesla removed the radar their max-speed with self-driving (or what is it called) dropped from 80mph to 75mph. What's worse is that they disabled the radar for everybody. How is that not a class action? You're losing features.
Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
The argument from Andrej Karpathy is that humans use vision and vision alone, so if we can learn to drive by vision, then so should an ML model. A radar is a sensor a human doesn't have, but we can gauge distance, and they also do introduce potential supply chain issues. So limiting the number of sensors is beneficial there. He also makes the argument that you have a tonne of data already. 8 1.2mp cameras, so 9.6 million pixels or effectively 9.6 million separate data points used to train the model. When you have that much data, what does including some relatively low resolution radar information give you that you couldn't infer from vision? I don't know enough about AI to know if he's right, but it makes some sense to me. I think my biggest issue with it is that human eyes are insanely high quality, able to adapt to huge changes in light levels and clean themselves every few seconds. I know Teslas have issues with cameras being blocked by sunlight and things like that. A human can just move their head and use the sun visor. With my limited knowledge I think vision probably is the ultimate way forward, but maybe they're too early. Perhaps there's some breakthrough we need to simplify the problem. I don't think Tesla will be the first to start making money from autonomous vehicles. I think Waymo will be the first. LIDAR isn't scalable but it simplifies a big part of the problem to the point that you can generate revenue from autonomous taxis while you train and perfect the general purpose vision model in the long term.
- philjohn 4y ago
  It doesn't make sense to me at all. We have an iris, this allows us to limit the amount of light hitting our retina, or increase it when conditions are darker. Do the cameras on a Tesla have shutters that can do this? Otherwise you're going to have fun when there is glare off a wet road.
  - Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
    Did you even read my comment?
- klondike_ 4y ago
  The issue is that self driving needs to be better than human drivers by a considerable margin. The public will not tolerate an AI driver that makes the same mistakes as humans, they expect better. To do this it will need access to sensors that humans don't have
marcosdumay 4y ago
It is certainly possible to make a self-driving system with vision alone. But it is also extremely likely that this is much harder than doing it with radar and lidar added to vision. Since nobody knows how to do any of them yet, you can't expect the company trying to solve the much harder problem to be one of the first to get it. Their communication is a constant denial of this fact. So they either have no idea what they are doing, or are lying through their teeth.
lamontcg 4y ago
I think it sounds like Musk looked at humans and went "we do fine with just vision, so make the computer do it with just vision, that has to be good enough" Which underappreciates the fact that it is such a hard problem (nature had 500M years to iterate on the reference design) that you want to cheat as hard as possible by giving yourself the best sensor information you can.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Automatic cars need to be better drivers than us, not just good enough, as another thing.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    If they were as good as the average sober and undistracted human they'd probably be a massive improvement. But yeah, they need to hit the highest bar possible. As we've seen with vaccines anything developed by humans has to be nearly perfect, while a "natural" massive clusterfuck with 40,000 deaths per year won't count for anything by comparison.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      > If they were as good as the average sober and undistracted human they'd probably be a massive improvement. How do you convince the better half of drivers that they should use a system that is worse than themselves, personally?
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        If you had a system that drove roughly as well as I do at my 90% best and cut out the worst 10% of my driving, and let me not have to deal with the road that'd be fine for me. And I probably should have said "sober, undistracted and competent human" since some people just shouldn't drive, and some people shouldn't be driving under certain conditions (which may not be tired or drunk, but going through a rough break up with late night emotional blowups).
- deleted 4y ago