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Tesla’s insistence on using vision alone is pretty dumb. Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision, that’s how we should do

• deleted 3y ago
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• Dalewyn 3y ago
  Human vision is simply converting rays of visible light sensed by our light sensors (aka eyes) into electric signals which are subsequently converted into an image by our brain which is then processed. Given that, perceiving the environment with radar, lidar, visible light, infrared, and so on is equivalent to human vision. As far as I'm aware, Tesla uses more than just visible light sensors. Am I wrong in my understanding?
  • selcuka 3y ago
    Park sensors, for example, use radar but they are not equivalent to human vision because humans can't see the back of the car, and they can't measure the distance as accurately.
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      I meant that they are equivalent in a very fundamentalist sense. You have input, taken by sensors, converted into usable form by a processor. There is no fundamental difference between visible light and radio waves, per se.
    • dghlsakjg 3y ago
      I thought parking sensors used ultrasonic. Wouldn’t that make them sonar?
      • selcuka 3y ago
        I believe there are also EM ones, but in either case, my point still stands.
  • thorncorona 3y ago
    > Given that, perceiving the environment with radar, lidar, visible light, infrared, and so on is equivalent to human vision. When paired with a general intelligence evolved over a couple million years, and visual sensors that have much more dynamic range than commercially available sensors yeah. The problem is without those 2 things Teslas crash into fire trucks. And different bands of EM have different properties so eyes aren’t equivalent to radar. Otherwise we would be able to see around corners. And if humans had more sensory data we would definitely be integrating it into our driving. Otherwise ADAS tech wouldn’t be so commonplace in 2023.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Even with those things, humans crash into fire trucks too...
      • dghlsakjg 3y ago
        Which is why we shouldn’t be replacing human vision with inferior versions done in software.
  • lambic2 3y ago
    Here's the background story to this: https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-who-knew-removing-radar-was-a-bad-idea/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-...
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      Thanks, I don't care to follow car news so I wasn't aware of that. Though, it seems Tesla reincorporated radar from their post '21 models on, so the premise of this sub-thread is at best outdated and at worst a half-truth. Oh well.
  • mjg59 3y ago
    Humans aren't capable of emitting an electromagnetic pulse, sensing the reflection, and using the time of flight to calculate distance between themselves and an object. So, no, lidar and radar aren't equivalent to human vision even if you extend the idea of human vision over a wider range of the EM spectrum.
• adamjcook 3y ago
  In my view, the higher-level issues with the FSD Beta program are: - A failure by Tesla to view the system that they are developing as what it really is - a physical safety-critical system and not "an AI". Those two are distinct systems as, with a physical safety-critical systems, the totality of the systems safety components cannot be fully expressed in software - neither initially nor continuously. - To build on that point, Tesla is not allowing the Operational Design Domain (ODD) via a robust, well-maintained validation process determine the vehicle hardware as the ODD demands it to be. Instead, Tesla is trying to "front run" it (ignore the demands of the ODD) by largely focusing on hardware costs. The tension from failing to recognize that is why Tesla, in part, has a long history of being forced to (somewhat clandestinely) change the relevant sensor and compute hardware on their vehicles while promising to "solve FSD" (whatever that means) by the end of every year since around 2015 or so.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    > and not "an AI" But what is AI? If it's just "artificial intelligence", it effectively includes all programming with if/then logic gates based on program input.
    • riceart 3y ago
      > it effectively includes all programming with if/then logic gates based on program input. And? You think that is the totality of a physical safety critical system?
      • judge2020 3y ago
        I'm pointing out that calling anything "AI" is both pointless and meaningless. It's a buzzword for board members and shareholders to throw around, since they refer to it as the latest LLM technology, while the phrase just means any complex business logic generated by a program.
        • v0idzer0 3y ago
          It’s generally accepted to mean the use of neural networks which Tesla is obviously using. Good luck even identifying a stop sign with “complex business logic” or “if/else”
• gdiamos 3y ago
  Current generation deep learning systems rely on supervised learning, which requires human labeling. This is one argument for vision alone. It’s easier for humans to teach the deep neural network what to do if they both see and label the same thing. It’s harder to build labeling systems that work on representations that humans don’t understand like point clouds or noisy depth maps. That isn’t to say that other sensors including radar, gps, LiDAR, other spectrum, etc don’t help. But you have to develop more complex labeling methods or move away from supervised learning.
  • neuronexmachina 3y ago
    Isn't the typical training data used in self-driving basically things like object labeling/segmentation and motion prediction? I'm not sure why that would be significantly different for visual vs depth-map data.
  • nextaccountic 3y ago
    Is it possible to transfer learning from vision to LIDAR? Maybe if it's possible to map visual images to LIDAR images and vice-versa (by running a car with both cameras and LIDAR and learning their associations)
    • simultsop 3y ago
      Probably everybody does it for themselves. So Tesla tries to have solely vision FSD while Waymo I guess does what you suggest. However seeing with lidar is not like vision only. Maybe at somepoint they share their code as OSS, probably not or very late.
  • bootlooped 3y ago
    This doesn't sound like much of a barrier to me. If you're a human training the LiDAR system, couldn't you just consult the image or video to help label whatever the LiDAR is seeing?
    • gdiamos 3y ago
      Here are some examples: https://github.com/songanz/3D-LiDAR-annotator/blob/master/annotation_presentation.gif https://github.com/songanz/3D-LiDAR-annotator/blob/master/an... https://dataloop.ai/platform/lidar/ https://dataloop.ai/platform/lidar/ A good supervised learning process requires teaching humans to label consistently. Imagine trying to write down precise instructions to train hundreds or thousands of humans to label many different types of objects using a tool like the above. Now hire, train, and manage those humans. Compare that to having the humans draw rectangles around 2d color pictures of cars. Also note that such tools need to be built and improved.
• izzydata 3y ago
  This implies that they can create a piece of software as intelligence as the human brain. Absolutely absurd reasoning. If they are being serious with such a statement then they are complete fools. More than likely they are just making excuses for why they are being cheap. Still fools, but maybe not complete fools.
  • pipodeclown 3y ago
    It doesn't imply that at all. That's like saying openai is creating a human level intelligence with chatgpt. Emulating a single function a human is able to perform really well is not the same as aiming for human level intelligence.
    • t43562 3y ago
      In driving don't we use all our intelligence? I know I'm sometimes on automatic when I'm tired but I don't see that as a good thing.
    • izzydata 3y ago
      This has nothing to do with ChatGPT. They claim they only need vision because a human only needs vision. Although that statement in of itself is false because humans have other senses, but they can't know how much complexity of the human brain is required to make only vision image processing work. If they can't at least replicate that level of intelligence then they have no business making such a claim.
• martythemaniak 3y ago
  It's smart if you realize that they never had a choice. No matter what Musk says, they could do vision-only or nothing at all. Google started their program in 2009 and had a pile of cash. Tesla started their program in 2015 ish and until 2019 they were in a precarious financial position. So they never had the money or time to take Google head on. With vision, they could at least use their position to their advantage. And it's a good bet. There's tons more to self driving than perceiving the world (lidar does not help a driver what to do in a novel and ambiguous situation, it's not a perception problem) and Tesla's vision is quite good based on all the FSD videos on YouTube.
• vosper 3y ago
  > Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision, that’s how we should do it in self driving cars I thought their argument was a little more like “since roads are designed for human vision, we should take a vision-based approach, too”. Not saying it’s the right idea, just that’s how I thought they had put it.
  • ugh123 3y ago
    I never bought that argument considering roads live in 3 dimensional space and our eyes and brain are constantly trying to decipher 2d space into depth. Seems like an extra hop that would be better cut out.
    • aitball 3y ago
      stereo cameras would allow a nn to do a similar thing
    • cdogl 3y ago
      I agree with your central point but take issue with this characterisation of human vision. For people who have two functioning eyes, the perception of depth is baked in. Our subjective experience of a 2d image is an illusion. In fact, much of our vision isn’t quite what we think; for example, what we think we’re seeing in our peripheral vision may actually get filled in based on inference and prediction. https://neurosciencenews.com/peripheral-vision-brain-illusion-5713/amp/ https://neurosciencenews.com/peripheral-vision-brain-illusio...
      • jcranmer 3y ago
        > For people who have two functioning eyes, the perception of depth is baked in. Actually, my understanding is that the depth perception induced by binocular vision is relevant only within a relatively short range (like, single-digit number of feet away), which makes it relatively useless for long-distance depth perception needed for driving.
        • 3y ago
• seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Sensor fusion is actually a hard problem. Yes, more different kind of sensors can lead to poorer results. Imagine having two different views in the world at unsynced points in time, and making decisions on that. It isn’t weird there might be a focus on LIDAR, or vision, but not both at the same time, at least for real time decision making.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    Google did it, so that argument is moot.
    • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      That is not how arguments work at all. I work for Google and I like what Waymo has accomplished (disclaimer: what I work on is nowhere near Waymo). Tesla is making a different bet with different engineering resources. And why would Google give up their secret sauce to Tesla?
  • foobazgt 3y ago
    I don't have to imagine this. My brain is doing sensor fusion every moment of every day. A lot of the time that involves conflicting data, and your brain has to decide on the most reasonable interpretation. When it's not at its best you get things like optical illusions, nausea, etc. It's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I think most people would agree that human beings are better off with the overlapping set of sensors that are available to us compared to the alternative.
• bparsons 3y ago
  Also, humans are pretty horrible at driving. They constantly commit traffic violations and kill eachother. Driving kills about 1 in 103 people in their lifetime. There is no other day to day activity where this level of risk is considered acceptable.
  • samtho 3y ago
    > Driving kills about 1 in 103 people in their lifetime. More people have been killed by cars than I have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion
    • bparsons 3y ago
      Let me be more precise. Human driving killed 42,939 people in the US in 2021.
      • rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        Apparently it’s 45,404. That’s still a little bit less than people killed by a gun the same year (48,830), and killed by opioids (nearly twice as many: 80,411). Let’s not forget an estimated 300k/year deaths related to obesity. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm. Whataboutism but puts those numbers in perspective.
        • dghlsakjg 3y ago
          The obesity deaths are comorbidity, which is… not to say that obesity killed them, but that it may have been a factor. E.g. obese 55 year olds that have a heart attack are in there, even though it is entirely possible for non-obese individuals to have heart attacks at young ages. Guns… most of those are suicides, and that stat is uniquely American in terms of developed countries. Opioids… also almost entirely self-inflicted (not willingly, but getting flattened by a bus is different than getting accidentally hooked) Car stats also don’t count the incredible number of people who have lifelong or major injuries due to cars, which I would imagine is much higher. I feel pretty comfortable saying that a majority of people I know have been injured by cars, something that isn’t true for opioids or guns.
• tzs 3y ago
  Also humans do sometimes do use additional senses when driving. For example I've had to make a left turn at a T intersection onto the cross street, where I had a stop sign and the cross traffic did not. This was in California's central valley where it can get very foggy making it very hard to see traffic until it was almost in the intersection. It was a quiet rural area though and by opening the windows on both sides and turning off the radio I could hear traffic quite a bit before I could see it. I'd sit at the stop listening until I'd heard a car or two go by to be sure that it was quiet enough that I could hear them. Once I'd calibrated my senses to that day's current conditions I was able to make the turn.
  • tshaddox 3y ago
    But to be fair, that’s just because you couldn’t easily see in that direction. Presumably a Tesla’s cameras can see in all directions. A better example would probably be hearing emergency sirens before there was any line of sight to the emergency vehicle.
    • recursive 3y ago
      Tesla cameras can't see through fog any better than eyes.
      • zebomon 3y ago
        Is this true though? Earlier today mine picked up on emergency lights that were several hundred feet further away in traffic than I would have seen them. It seems able to enhance the images the cameras capture.
        • GenerocUsername 3y ago
          Could also be aware of the position of fixed road equipment via mapping software. It's more plausible than the cameras having some kind of super vision.
          • 3y ago
• hprotagonist 3y ago
  their argument is specious; i suspect the actual reason is “lidar/other sensor system components are expensive or hard to acquire”.
• add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  > Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision Is this maliciously specious or am I missing something? I drive using vision plus decades of life experience and all the tacit knowledge, judgement, and reasoning ability that comes from that. We have not reproduced any of that with math, and getting/stalling 90% of the way there with mimicry is not good enough.
  • saghm 3y ago
    I don't think it's super surprising that someone who sells a product called "Full Self Driving" that isn't fully self driving would also happen to lack rigor in their scientific claims.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    It's obvious that they're talking about the input ("sensors") humans use and not presenting an exhaustive list of the things required to drive.
    • rootusrootus 3y ago
      Even just comparing sensors, the mediocre cameras Tesla uses are absolutely pathetic compared to the ability of a human eye. And I'm guessing it'll be some years yet before we have some kind of parity there. Not to mention the computing power to process the data.
      • snovv_crash 3y ago
        In some senses they are far superior to the human eye, peripheral vision for example.
  • williamcotton 3y ago
    It has more to do with training a neural network. The environmental cues for driving on a road are optimized for human vision. This becomes important when you think about it from a machine learning perspective. Fewer inputs are better for many reasons. Non-visual inputs will sometimes be in disagreement when the visual inputs during training which leads to a worse model. If everyone could take some deep breathes and press pause on their emotional response to Elon Musk (and not assume everyone who happens to agree with him has a Musk tattoo) then they would fine plenty of rational arguments from an engineering perspective.
• justapassenger 3y ago
  Their logic is on the same level as arguing that birds fly with just wings, so no idea why we’re playing with those silly engines.
  • leobg 3y ago
    Which isn’t a dumb argument at all. It’s what got us flying in the first place, thanks to a brave Geman engineer called Lilienthal.
    • justapassenger 3y ago
      And? Camera only systems got us first lane centering technologies.
• spoonjim 3y ago
  Humans use a lot of reasoning though. I once saw a guy approaching an intersection where he had the red light and from far away I could see he was jamming out to the music and in his own world. I didn’t go on green (getting honked at by the guy behind me) and watched while the guy blew straight though the red light and slammed on the brakes when he was almost fully through it.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    Will you also tell us a time where you made a careless mistake that a self-driving car would not make?
    • t43562 3y ago
      It's fairly obvious that cars cannot think at the level of humans and are at a disadvantage sometimes. We also don't need fully autonomous driving to prevent careless mistakes.
    • spoonjim 3y ago
      I’m not saying I’m better than a self driving car… I’m saying that using vision alone for cost cutting is short sighted and might kill the industry.
• giantrobot 3y ago
  > Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision Which is insipid because humans do not use just vision when driving. We use hearing, touch, and proprioception extensively when driving.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    Not to perform the main driving task though. Deaf people tend to be able to get a driver's license no problem, and proprioception is mostly irrelevant unless you need to know where your feet are to ensure they're on the correct pedals.
• NeuroCoder 3y ago
  I'm not privy to the legit decisions around Teslas tech vs PR that I occasionally run across. Does this mean they are dedicated to only using traditional vision comparable to humans or is that just their focus at the current time? I can appreciate there's only so much tech that can be reliably developed for mass production at a given time but Elon also tends to make some odd choices/statements out of principle.
• im_down_w_otp 3y ago
  Humans also use inertial sensation, vibration, force feedback through the steering wheel, and their “cameras” are constantly changing their focus and position in space to construct a rich context of the environment. Now, all of these things except the last one have some representation through an electronic or electromechanical sensor, but gluing them all together into what it takes to deal effectively with the intersection of vehicle dynamics and environmental dynamics is very hard.
  • v0idzer0 3y ago
    Humans also don’t have 8 eyes facing every direction at all times. They also get drunk/tired/impatient/angry etc. The reality is the entire argument is silly. Both are very different and Musk/Karpathy argument is misrepresented here. Saying humans only use vision was a response to “its not possible with only vision” not a statement that human vision is good enough and no need to do better. The 8 camera surround is leaps better than human vision. Where they lack is processing the signal. Human brain does that better. But if you have better inputs (we do already) and you believe you can one day match on the processing part, you’ll one day get a much better result. One thats suited to the vision based roads we have now and scales to literally anywhere not geo constrained like Waymo
    • logifail 3y ago
      > They also get drunk/tired/impatient/angry Indeed, but humans also have an incentive to drive well, embodied by local traffic police and local laws, and even before passing their driving test they're made aware of the penalties for not driving well (which, let's remind ourselves, range from "mild ticking off"/"pay $$$" through "forfeit driving licence for a time" all the way to "forfeit liberty for a time") Where are these incentives for self-driving algorithms? If your algo breaks the law to a sufficient level, is someone(something?) prevented from driving for a time? Is that really going to be just that one vehicle, or should it be all vehicles with that same algo? If something really bad happens, who is charged; in the worst case, who might end up going to jail? We all know CEOs tend to believe "this time it's different", that they're special, and that the annoying rulebook is to be viewed as guidance at best. VW/Martin Winterkorn, anyone?
• v0idzer0 3y ago
  That was just their reply to “is it even possible?”. Their argument is that vision actually works better than sensors. The signal processing data it receives is higher quality. You just have to know how to process it like the human brain does. It’s a harder solution, but if solved a better one
  • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > The signal processing data it receives is higher quality... It’s a harder solution, but if solved a better one What is the basis for this claim? Have you seen the kind of data other sensors provide? Radar gives you exact distance and velocity of a vehicle thats hundreds of meters away, through fog, in the dark. Cameras can't even give you distance for objects that are too far away
• brianstorms 3y ago
  Also, humans and other animals that rely on vision have eyelids and tear ducts and are able to blink and get stuff out of an eye. Poor, poor Tesla cameras freak out as soon as the sunshine is too bright or there's snow or rain or ice or mud in the way. You'd think if they're going to rely on vision, every camera mounted on the car would have a way to "squint" in blinding-light conditions, or "wipe" the lens or something when smudges, rain, snow, ice, mud, or bug-splat blocks the view. But then, Tesla is insanely cheap, and all that would require parts, and that would impact margins, and that would impact stock price, and so, this is why we can't have nice things ....
  • est31 3y ago
    Yeah human eyes cover a huge dynamic range compared to traditional cameras that have all sorts of issues with either too little or too much light (blooming, lens flares). Are a Tesla's cameras of the same quality of the human eye? Can they see in the dark just as well?
    • alpaca128 3y ago
      Not only can Tesla's cameras not do that as well, they may also just shut down if it's too cold, even if they're not covered in snow. Current self driving systems sometimes fail in perfect weather conditions on correctly marked, empty roads. There's a long road ahead if it's supposed to actually work in the real world.
      • fastball 3y ago
        Human vision sometimes fails in perfect weather conditions on correctly marked, empty roads. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans.
        • grumple 3y ago
          That's a failure of attention, not vision. All the sources I'm able to find say there are no cameras in existence that are as good as human vision. Human vision is quite good and adaptive to real world conditions of all sorts.
• fwlr 3y ago
  I am sympathetic to this view (I would really love to see just how safe it’s possible to get), but I think the Musk/Karpathy-style argument for vision-only self-driving is quite strong, and it only seems flawed because it has been incorrectly simplified as “humans do driving with ~only vision -> computers should do driving with only vision”. The proper argument is “humans do driving with ~only vision -> roads are therefore universally designed and built to be driven via by vision -> computers should do driving with only vision”. It is essentially a standards-based argument: since vision is the universal standard for driving, computers must be able to drive using just vision. So vision is always going to be the core of self-driving. Why not augment with LIDAR anyway? Well, in situations where vision and LIDAR are both right, you didn’t need LIDAR; in situations where vision is right and LIDAR is wrong, you didn’t need LIDAR and it potentially made you worse off; in situations where vision is wrong and LIDAR is right, you need to spend more on improving your vision; and in situations where both vision and LIDAR are wrong, you need to spend more on improving both, but improving vision is a higher priority. These are all the possible outcomes and none of them make a compelling case for investing in LIDAR.
  • kanbara 3y ago
    radar is not lidar and is present on lots of vehicles that do L2/L3 driving except newer Tesla. optical sensors do not inherently tell you distance as a function of their sensing, whereas radar does. a vision only approach _may_ be possible at some time, but only with a strong computational model of the human brain and thought process. also, most people drive poorly— i wouldn’t say vision is the be-all-end-all of autonomous driving. it’s also clear that waymo and cruise have taken a full sensor based approach and are successful, whereas tesla is not.
    • fwlr 3y ago
      I originally had “radar/LIDAR” everywhere you see “LIDAR” in that comment but it got really unwieldy halfway through. I think what I said generalizes from the specific example of LIDAR to other forms of sensing pretty well anyway, so you can just sub in radar if you want. The general principle is “vision” (in the sense of cameras feeding 2D image data into something that is probably a neural network) vs “everything else”. I would have said cameras vs sensors but some of the sensors use the visible light spectrum and so their sensors are called cameras. I like your use of “optical”, that might be the cleanest way to point at what I meant. I broadly agree with your second point, about vision-only presenting big computational challenges. I think you do get some easy wins that bring down the challenge a bit - e.g. you don’t need to model human brains, you just need to model whatever the brain is doing when it’s driving; also the fact that we can teach people to drive without understanding what their brain is doing is a reassurance that we can teach a neural network to drive without understanding what it is doing either, so it frees us from (some) of the modeling of thought processes as well. But it is still a big computational challenge. I heard that Tesla has a server farm with thousands of Nvidia A100s, if true, that could make a dent in the problem for sure. And yeah, I also wouldn’t say vision is the be-all and end-all when it comes to driving. (It’s a pity that we can’t easily integrate LiDAR, radar, and other sensors into the human brain so we could use them like we do sight and sound in order to drive better.) My point is more that roads come in all shapes and types and sizes, but one consistent thing about them is that they’re all designed so that humans can use vision to drive on them. Like, you don’t know if future roads/signs/cars will be built in ways that are hard to read with LiDAR, but you can be pretty confident they won’t be built to be hard to see. Road builders, car makers - everyone else involved in the driving industry is designing for vision. It’s implicit, and it’s aimed at human vision, but it’s one of the few universal constraints on driving. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a standards-based argument, that vision is sort of a “universal interface” for roads. Another “universal interface” for roads might be wheels (with traction), or more specifically tires. You don’t need to have rubber tires, or even wheels at all, to drive on roads - but if you do have tires, you can pretty confident that you can drive on pretty much any road you come across.
• rzimmerman 3y ago
  The argument is more complicated than Elon makes it out to be. "Humans can drive with vision alone => computers can drive with vision alone" implies computers can do anything the human brain can do. It's not a given, and it's certainly not true for the compute power in a Tesla. It's completely possible that all of the following are true: * Humans can drive with vision alone * A sufficiently advanced compute system can drive with cameras alone * Telsa's FSD computer cannot match human performance without additional sensors
• cypress66 3y ago
  If you actually try FSD beta you'll very quickly realize that the vast majority (over 95% probably) of disengagements are because the planner is dumb, not because of vision. In other words, on the screen it sees everything correctly, it just decides to do something dumb. So currently the vision stack is not greatly holding them back.
  • eagsalazar2 3y ago
    This is 100% true. Lidar improves accuracy by millimeters up close, inches at 10-50 feet away and feet beyond that. That accuracy is more than sufficient. Recognition and classification of objects is not improved at all (that part that matters). And, like parent post said, tesla classifies everything very very well, the real issue is that the planner acts completely crazy all the time and is scary.
    • fastball 3y ago
      Presumably object classification is easier if you have a higher resolution image of the object.
      • ccozan 3y ago
        There are two decisions when driving: go ahead around an obstacle or stop. Even as a human I do not need super high resolution to identify the objects asround, as long as I can identify if is in my path or not. While our eyes can do that pretty reliable, we are organics and get tired - how many hours one can drive until this becomes almost imposible? I had a situation where I would hallucinate and and start believing something is in the street do I did a full stop - nothing happened, but was quite intense. Imagine the other way around - not stopping and hitting something. A normal radar + some low level ASIC programming would do that without geting tired. My Audi from 2014 is quite good at that and I actually rely on this feature all the time.
  • bottlepalm 3y ago
    Exactly, FSD Beta is currently driving me around 90% of the time, and none of the problems are sensor/vision related, but decision related. Updates are happening around once a month and the decision making is getting noticeably better.
• jknoepfler 3y ago
  Forgive me if this seems like a knee-jerk response, but literally zero human drivers use "vision alone" to drive. Humans drive with a spacio-temporal model of the world, visual, auditory, and haptic feedback, logical/symbollic rules about driving norms, emulative models of other drivers/agents in the driving environment, ethical judgments about what it is ok/not ok to collide with... and so on and so forth. Reducing that to "vision" doesn't even make superficial sense.
  • mariusor 3y ago
    I always wondered, and don't remember seeing it specified one way or another, do self-driving AIs use any sort of temporal modelling for the environment? A model which can use predictive behaviour for the objects that the visual part detects seems orders of magnitude better than one that just does visual detection from scratch. Seems like a huge wasted opportunity to have to model the world starting from zero for every frame they receive from the cameras. Objects that pop-in and out of the field of vision due to occlusion or other reasons seem to trip Teslas (in at least some of the reported incidents), but even like that it's hard to believe that they didn't implement such an obvious improvement.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  Humans not only use vision, they use sensor fusion. Combining what you see, hear, touch, etc. Your body can perceive acceleration, for example. On top of that, you have theory of mind. For example, you have 4 cars next to you, all of them with opaque windows that do not let you see the driver: A) a loud sports car with a bunch of modifications, decals and racing related stuff B) a grandma car with cat related stickers C) an unmaintained car with collision damage, and loud music coming from it D) a family station wagon with a baby on board sticker and other family related stuff Your mind will process what it sees and quickly assign each one of those cars a different personality. A and C will likely be perceived as riskier cars, B and D will be likely perceived as safer cars. You will avoid A and C and remain unconcerned about B and D. The problem with the self-driving cars right now is that they only perceive the road as bodies that move.
  • senttoschool 3y ago
    Great point. We use far more than just vision. I just imagined myself driving without sound. That seems crazy to me. I need to hear cars, kids playing, etc. And you're right that we subconsciously assign risk values to each car. A heavily modified BMW with decals? Could be an irresponsible young male adult trying to show off on the road. I should probably be prepared to brake or let him go first.
  • flomo 3y ago
    Reminds me when I drove a cab in my early 20s. I had a psychological bead on other drivers, I knew what they were going to do before they knew it. (And to some extent I still do, I just try not to be a dick about it.) AI will probably eventually very good at picking up these behavior tendencies. Or at least better than the people who aren't driving all day.
  • jo909 3y ago
    And assumption like that are probably a great source of accidents, our mind needs to take some shortcuts like that and isn't always right. Grandmas car got sold last week and daddy is alone in the car and late for work and will be racing to get in front of you. I'd rather have a computer keep track of everybody just the same but with millisecond reaction to all changes. Something that I can't do lacking eyes all around and processing power.
• deleted 3y ago
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• ndhillon 3y ago
  This is a mischaracterization of what he is saying. Humans are unable to drive without vision. Even Chris Urmson agrees that LiDAR is a crutch that measures distance as opposed to computing it (albeit it only works in perfect weather). Musk is saying that if you are going to use a sensor to measure distance, don’t use photons in the visible light spectrum. Instead use photons that can penetrate objects (microwaves) to capture information that you wouldn’t have. The challenge is building a high-precision RADAR, which Tesla is attempting to do. Some HW4 vehicles have it but it’s unclear whether it is required or not. Ultimately, building a L4 AV requires solving very difficult problems in computer vision, which is exactly what they are trying to do
  • cameldrv 3y ago
    Musk did not publicly endorse high resolution radar until recently, and using high resolution radar is not a unique feature of Teslas. Waymo currently has 5 high resolution radars on their cars.
    • foobazgt 3y ago
      Musk endorsed high resolution radar as Tesla was removing the existing radar. https://electrek.co/2022/06/08/tesla-files-use-new-radar-confused/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/08/tesla-files-use-new-radar-con... Given what is public now, I'd speculate that perhaps they were working on replacing radar all this time. Then they used vision as an excuse to dump the existing radar early when there was a parts shortage. I see Musk acting a lot like Jobs in certain ways. They were both very cagey about the future direction of their products. Although Musk didn't exactly backtrack on radar, he wasn't transparent about Tesla's plans either. You don't telegraph your moves to your competitors. Similarly, I'd be very surprised if Tesla wasn't keeping an eye out for lidar crossing a specific cost/function threshold. They're not saying that aloud, though.
  • tsimionescu 3y ago
    This is anachronic. Musk was making the vision argument to claim that Teslas sold at the time (which lacked any kind of LIDAR or radar) had all of the hardware they needed to do FSD, which was sold as "just a few months away via software update". I believe that they still make this claim officially, since it's important to deny that they dif false advertising on this front.
• mupuff1234 3y ago
  If you view Tesla for what it is - a car company than the insistence doesn't seem dumb. They got all the hype and PR for the AI angle without the money pit that comes with a real self driving project. Even if they eventually get cannibalized by actual self driving cars then they still made billions and billions in the process.
• de6u99er 3y ago
  I brlieve self driving can be achieved through standards, e.g. if roads become digital. Street signs and cars could communicate the current state of traffic in real time with other cars. It should be left to the state to detect certain events. E.g. traffic jams or, if a bicycle or pedestrian is about to cross the road. This way liability issues could be fairly split up between law- and car-makers.
  • medellin 3y ago
    That sounds great if we want to rebuild our entire road infrastructure. So using this for self driving will never happen since it would require every country to implement a very costly standard. Sounds great in practice but isn’t realistic in the slightest
    • oblib 3y ago
      >> Sounds great in practice but isn’t realistic in the slightest And that's also why a "self driving" car isn't realistic. I think the proper term for what we have now should, at most, be something more akin to "Assisted Driving Features" because right now it's far to blurry.
    • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > would require every country to implement a very costly standard. Thats what road are already. They are costly and they are mostly standard through out the world.
    • hnburnsy 3y ago
      Not sure that a rebuild is necessary, could be a simple as beacons on the back of emergency vehicles, 'qr' coded signs, and reflective road markers. Tesla already detects traffic cones... https://electrek.co/2019/11/07/tesla-autopilot-handle-construction-zone-traffic-cones-video/ https://electrek.co/2019/11/07/tesla-autopilot-handle-constr...
• voytec 3y ago
  > Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision, that’s how we should do it in self driving cars, but I think that’s a flawed argument. Of course. The real argument is "LIDAR is expensive in comparison and after scamming people for almost a decade, we have to be careful what kind of money we ask for". LIDAR was never considered an overkill by Elon.
• jrpt 3y ago
  Obviously they know that. They are just betting that they can do it with vision only, to save on expenses, and also work with the way their cars work today.
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    And they're betting with other people's money but keep the profits.
• andrewfong 3y ago
  I'm still annoyed they got rid of the ultrasonic sensors on the latest model. I test drove a 2022 (or maybe a 2021) and the park assist was pretty good. And then I get the 2023 delivered and there's no park assist for the first 6 months because they removed the ultrasonics but the vision-only software wasn't ready yet. A vision-based park assist finally came in via an OTA update but it's nowhere near as precise as the ultrasonic version was. Like, the estimates of how much distance is in front of me seem to jump around a lot more than I'm actually moving, and it sometimes reports it's degraded when trying to pull out of a tight spot.
  • birdyrooster 3y ago
    Tesla drivers are the product, they train the machine and put up with garbage so that Elon can invest in his future profits. Self selected clones.
• TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Also I think the biggest discovery is that the “brain” part of the human “eyes plus brain” part is extremely hard, and “sensor which can see depth” probably makes the brain part easier. That said, Tesla was never in a position to use LiDAR because it has generally been extremely expensive. Solid state lidars are supposedly now hitting low volume testing for 2025 production years. Tesla is a mass manufacturer not a self driving start up, so there was never really an option for them to offer LiDAR without an extremely expensive self driving package. One thing however that was obviously wrong was Elon’s promises, which were extremely misleading and helped build his fortune thanks to the misunderstanding. (Assuming this inflated stock values) With solid state LiDAR supposedly becoming available for $500 in the next two years (a promise we have heard since 2016 but one that seems possibly to finally be coming true) we may never end up seeing if Tesla could have ever done it with pure vision - they could go with solid state LiDAR for forward facing driving in the next few years. That said, over promising is going well for them. Perhaps they will just keep doing that.
  • jakeinspace 3y ago
    If Tesla caves and ships LiDAR, I don’t see how they can get out of refunding all previously sold FSD packages. They can continue working on camera-only FSD but it will be immediately apparent that there’s a massive gulf in safety and performance between that and the LiDAR-equipped option.
    • TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Well, it’s cheaper to retrofit a $500 LiDAR than it is to refund a $10,000 option. I’m curious how they handled upgrades to the more powerful computer they released. And we can expect they will release another more powerful computer again. The same issues would apply, but they have no choice but to deal with it if they ever want to ship a fully functional system.
      • Bluestrike2 3y ago
        Refits might cost less than a full $10,000 refund, but they're definitely going to be expensive enough I could imagine Tesla trying to do everything in their power to avoid. Installing the LiDAR unit in the front bumper would require replacing the entire existing front bumpers since there's no handy fake grille or whatever you can pop out and replace. You'll also have to paint the bumpers to match and blend onto surrounding panels since these cars have been in the sun long enough that a fresh-from-the-factory bumper will have an obvious color mismatch. If you don't, you'll have pissed off car owners to deal with and, in all likelihood, another class-action suit. A roof-mount avoids that, but has its own issues. You'll needs techs to drill a freaking hole in the roof, mount the LiDAR unit, hope that they manage to seal the penetration well enough that water won't leak into the car, and then run cables through the interior. A whole hell of a lot of cars will leak, even if the work is performed to spec, so you'll have extend warranty coverage to deal with it. Plus, you've now got an ugly box on the roof that may or may not match the paint properly, whereas presumably the new cars will at least integrate the unit's lines into the body panels so it's not quite as obvious. The same thing goes sticking it on the hood. That's to say nothing of any hardware replacements and the fiddly bits that'll be necessary for refits.
• Someone 3y ago
  > since humans can drive using just vision, that’s how we should do it in self driving cars Not the strongest of arguments. “since humans move around on foot, that’s how we should design machines that help us move stuff around” “Since humans do long-distance communication by shouting, hand or smoke signals, that’s how we should do it in transatlantic communication” “since birds can fly using wings, that’s how we should do it in machines that fly”
  • deleted 3y ago
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• graycat 3y ago
  Humans also use sound as in tires squealing, something going "thump, thump, thump", someone screaming, horns, sirens, "crash, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle", etc. Humans also use their sense of motion from the car sliding, rocking, tilting, jerking, etc. Then humans integrate all such input, combine that with what they know about how cars work, traffic, people, the road, diagnose what has happened, apply years of prudent judgment, and then decide what to do. E.g., maybe they have an ice chest with 20 pounds of ice which has melted and now, due to the motion of the car, has tilted, spilled, and is about to get the dog soaked with ice water. Good luck with the self-driving with a good response to such a scenario.
• spullara 3y ago
  It is self-evident that you only need vision to drive. The question is whether you can make a computer smart enough to leverage vision to do it.
  • j16sdiz 3y ago
    No. You listen to the road condition. You sense the road bumping. You feel the acceleration. Your eye have better dynamic range.
    • spullara 3y ago
      We aren't arguing about easy stuff, we are arguing about radar / lidar being necessary.
  • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    it is self evident that you only need legs to move around and gears are just extra weight. why do cars have gears?
  • bluecalm 3y ago
    Why is it self-evident? If your argument is that people can drive with only vision let me stop you right there and point to the fact that people are terrible drivers and the bill is in millions of injured and dead a year. The main argument after the collision? "I haven't seen them!".
• shaky-carrousel 3y ago
  Humans can drive using just vision, but the autopilot doesn't have the processing capabilities of a human by a long long margin. So the smartest thing to do would be to compensate the worse processing capabilities with better senses.
• mytailorisrich 3y ago
  I think the 'proper' approach is to use whatever is economically viable to get to the desired result as quickly as possible. Ultimately the market will only ask two things: Does it work? And, how much does it cost? No-one cares that "Ah but ours only uses vision".
• WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  This argument is really dumb. I understand deaf people can drive, too, but the additional auditory input is very helpful. When an emergency vehicle is far behind me, I hear the sirens and know to look in the mirror and move right to let it pass me. I can hear the bells of a railroad crossing even if I cannot see its lights blinking due to the road curvature, and start reducing my speed so I approach it smoothly. Some stupid junctions like the one described below, I hear a car approaching well before I can see it. That said, there is no point making a self driving rig if it’s going to only be as good as the best humans are. For adoption, it must be provably better in any situation imaginable: moving obstacles, weather, dust, dark drunk humans in the night, emergency vehicles, no lanes drawn on the road, read all road signs correctly (say my Yaris gives me mistaken readings where maximum mass is confused with speed, it doesn’t know what “built-up” area means with regard to speed limits, it sometimes reads a sign that belongs to an adjacent road). For it all to work, you need more input than vision. And redundancy. Lots of redundancy.
• LatteLazy 3y ago
  "Humans can move without any wheels at all!" exclaimed the Tesla engineer as he announced Tesla's new Legs only, Wheels are for Losers policy.
• b33j0r 3y ago
  I’m personally surprised that this strategy plateaued as soon it has. It had an extremely sharp early-success curve. Opinion: a lot of people in this space thought “no one wants to get in a car with a radar tower on top, can’t we make it just look like a car?” And decisions proceeded from there.
• ekianjo 3y ago
  > Tesla’s insistence on using vision alone is pretty dumb If they can finally make it work well one day, that comment will be the one looking dumb in the end. just saying that one should be careful about making this kind of assumptions... > if given additional senses, wouldn’t humans use them for safer driving? It's all a question of costs in the end. It would be safer to fly with 10 pilots in one airplane, but the economics make it work for 2-3 at most.
• gmac 3y ago
  Agreed: it’s like they’re insisting on playing on hard mode (or is that cheap mode?).
• Geee 3y ago
  I've watched FSD videos quite a lot, and I've never seen an issue related to sensing / visual detection. It always draws the road and other cars with decent accuracy. All issues happen in the planner, i.e. the car makes a wrong decision, not because it can't see something, but because it doesn't know what to do in that situation. The hard problems in autonomous driving are not related to sensing, but deciding what to do in weird or complex situations. See this video for an example of a typical problem in recent FSD (and you can see from the screen that it's not related to sensing / detection): https://youtu.be/eY3z1kgX5hY?t=74 https://youtu.be/eY3z1kgX5hY?t=74
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    It has trouble detecting speed bumps and potholes. I'm not sure if this is because the vision sensors fail, or because they have not been programmed to detect/display these features properly. Whatever the reason, the planner then accelerates right into them.
• Reubend 3y ago
  I agree. Vision only approaches are cheaper but far more difficult in the long run. But that wouldn't be a problem if Tesla didn't advertise their cars as containing all the necessary hardware for self driving. If Tesla admitted that cameras were insufficient for self-driving, they would open themselves up to legal liability.
• timthelion 3y ago
  Humans have two eyes that move in sync and can measure distance using the auto-focus feature. They can both point at an object and autofocus to figure out how far that object is. I don't see teslas using moving binocular cameras with 10th of a second autorefocusing in order to judge distances. I don't see how it is the same thing. Of course we can play GTA with just vision, but I'd argue the average person crashes in GTA more than they do in a real car.
  • cainxinth 3y ago
    > Of course we can play GTA with just vision, but I'd argue the average person crashes in GTA more than they do in a real car. I’m fairly certain that people would drive more safely in GTA if their life was literally at stake.
    • vibrio 3y ago
      I once barely survived a ride with a taxi driver in Tijuana who claimed to have learned to drive playing GTA. Based on his real-world driving it seemed plausible although We did not have to visit a spray’n’pay at any point. I never got to seem him play GTA so I can’t verify or refute your hypothesis.
  • treis 3y ago
    That's due to the small viewing window, controller, and physics of GTA. In proper simulators with steering wheels and big screens they do fine.
  • eternauta3k 3y ago
    Aren't the eyes basically always focused at infinity while driving?
• mrjin 3y ago
  Cannot agree more. Even that argument was not only flawed but rather false. We use at least hearing to help driving. I'm not sure I'm alone, after closing all windows, I feel a huge different in the car just like I was disconnected from the outside. The thing is, Elon has lots of fans.
• leobg 3y ago
  Thanks not the full argument, actually. The argument is: You’ll need to solve vision anyway. Because you need to know what the object is. Is it a trash can or is it a dog? Will it move or stay? If you had LiDAR, you’d still need sensor fusion with a camera to answer those questions, introducing more problems. That’s why Elon says that any company that relies on LiDAR is doomed. LiDAR isn’t the gold standard - it’s the low hanging fruit.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    It remains to be seen: Musk is making a bet that Tesla could win big or lose here. It is an interesting bet to be sure, but Waymo's bet is as well (sensor fusion, and LIDAR will become affordable over time). I like that we have some diversity in the bets being made at least.
• GrumpyNl 3y ago
  If thats the argumentation they go by, the car should be able to drive on tomatoes.
• entropicgravity 3y ago
  My question to Musk would be,"Is there one, cheap, device that could be deployed widely on roads that could improve self driving cars enough to push the technology into viability by a substantial margin?".