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Unless there is a change in how autonomous driving software is trained, it seems Tesla is destined to dominate that market, right? Tesla has the most training

• 7sidedmarble 2y ago
  That visual sensors only seem like they make no sense when they can get obstructed by weather
  • mavhc 2y ago
    The main cameras are behind the windscreen, so cleaned by the wipers
  • redwood 2y ago
    I don't get this perspective. Somehow humans drive with visual input
    • snakeyjake 2y ago
      The goal is to be better than, not equivalent to, humans-- right? I work on a synthetic aperture radar system that is high-resolution enough to "see" the painted stripes on roads through fog and a thin layer of snow. It's not for automotive use and would increase the price of every car by several hundred thousand dollars but a fusion of multi-spectrum sensors should be the direction we are headed-- not a minimally-viable mono-sensor system.
      • andix 2y ago
        Its enough to be as good as a responsible human driver, but consistently. The AI is never going to be tired, distracted, angry, drunk, and so on. Drivers not bringing their A-game is probably the most common reason for accidents.
      • ethbr1 2y ago
        I'd be nervous of automobiles falling into the US housing trap. In other words, failing to realize that raising minimum requirements (and therefore prices) makes it unaffordable for an increasing number of people. Human-parity (in terms of accident rate, not failure mode) seems a reasonable minimum bar.
        • snakeyjake 2y ago
          New automobiles are available for the same price they’ve always been. For proof I offer the price of the 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, the least expensive new car for sale in the US market for almost its entire sales history: $1800. That’s for one with zero options. A rolling chassis with four seats and a motor. That’s $16k today. Coincidentally the same price of the Nissan Versa or Mitsubishi Mirage: with backup camera, air conditioning, and airbags. People don’t WANT the cheap cars, though. I know the average price of a new car has exploded. That is a conscious choice by the consumer. When production of autonomous tech scales it won’t increase costs as much as people assume.
          • ethbr1 2y ago
            Can SAR scaled across congestion ever be that cheap though? Blanketing the frequency slice with echos seems like a non-trivial problem. Or would that help?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • constantcrying 2y ago
      And a human with centimeter depth perception could drive far better. The goal of an autonomous car isn't to replicate human driving, it is to drive safely, accurately and in accordance to the laws.
      • Aexian 2y ago
        This is extremely important to remember, especially when Tesla describe their neural net approach as being easily fine-tuned to different jurisdictions. I’ve seen the “human-like” behaviour of FSD 12.x praised a lot by channels like this, particularly where the car is breaking the rules in a way they consider “normal”. And it’s a fair argument that predictable behaviour improves safety. However, behaviour that is common in the US - like making a turn into a side street while a pedestrian is beginning to cross - would be considered exceptionally aggressive and reckless here in Australia. It’s a cultural difference I’ve adapted to when moving back and forth. At the end of the day though, when I walk across a street, I don’t want to have to worry if Tesla has fine tuned their model correctly to match our local expectations of yielding. I’d rather they just followed the law as closely as possible - because that’s the most predictable behaviour of all.
    • kibwen 2y ago
      Humans are terrible drivers, and even the human brain's reasoning capability is still light years ahead of anything Tesla is capable of shipping. The advantage of machines is not that they have better brains than humans, but that they have better senses than humans, which is an advantage that goes out the window when you obstinately refuse to use better sensors than merely cameras "because that's what humans use".
      • redwood 2y ago
        That hasn't been my experience in a self driving Tesla. Against a setting sun in stop and go traffic on the freeway it was far better able to sense the road than a human alone and I think it has a lot of redundancy as well as views into all directions.
  • ajross 2y ago
    The car sees as well as the driver does. Is that good enough for all circumstances? No, clearly not. But refusing to drive in situations that are unsafe for people too sounds like a feature, not a bug. I mean, let's be blunt: the "LIDAR vs. cameras" debate has been settled at this point, and the fancy sensors lots. Of all the things one can complain about with FSD, sensor fidelity is not one. Teslas don't hit things. The problems remaining to be solved are in the planning regime: my car still misses turns at a rate somewhat higher than I do, usually because it's in the wrong lane (and that often because it thought that the backup in the turn lane was something it could go around).
• viraptor 2y ago
  I couldn't actually find the amount of data that Tesla uses for training, but I'm curious: how much is it, and is it larger than what comma.ai has?
  • misiti3780 2y ago
    they are collecting 1B miles of data every 2-3 months https://www.autoevolution.com/news/elon-musk-explains-the-latest-improvements-to-the-tesla-full-self-driving-software-233632.html https://www.autoevolution.com/news/elon-musk-explains-the-la... they will be using 85K H100s (up from 35K now) for training by the end of 2024: https://www.shacknews.com/article/139619/tesla-ai-training-nvidia-gpus https://www.shacknews.com/article/139619/tesla-ai-training-n...
    • viraptor 2y ago
      That's not what the article says. > This vastly expanded the FSD testing pool, with the Tesla fleet adding 1 billion FSD miles every 2-3 months It doesn't mean they collect the video feed and all input from every second of those miles. Just that the FSD drives those miles.
      • misiti3780 2y ago
        Yes, they probably dont need to. But if you have your configs to share data with Tesla, and you have an intervention while on FSD, that small few seconds of video gets uploaded to them. That is the important data.
  • rapsey 2y ago
    They can use every Tesla vehicle for training. They definitely have more data than anyone.
    • viraptor 2y ago
      They can. But do they? Comma can collect from any vehicle, regardless of type. There's also a matter of deduplication where they really don't need to use ~250 days a year of the same commute. They probably have more data than others, but I'm asking for a proper confirmation of this common knowledge.
• misiti3780 2y ago
  they seems to be very far ahead of anyone else, the new versions are pretty insane.
• hackerlight 2y ago
  No twist of fate, but self-sabotage in the form of being unwilling to use Lidar. Look how hard Waymo and Cruise are finding it to do robotaxis in a small geographical area and with Lidar. Tesla is trying to do robotaxis everywhere without using Lidar. They're solving a harder problem and are handicapping themselves while trying to do it. Here's why Lidar makes sense. You want independent information streams that are cross checked. If both streams tells you there is no object in front of you, that's a way lower probability of being wrong than just one stream telling you that. You go from probability p to p^2 of being catastrophically wrong. It's the kind of probabilistic added safety of being in an aircraft that's capable of flying with only one engine. Even if one blows up with probability p, you're fine. You need a p^2 event for both engines to malfunction, assuming errors aren't correlated, which they probably are a bit, but not so much that the added benefit isn't massive.
  • maxcan 2y ago
    Counterpoint - Tesla is trying to avoid a local maximum where they are able to do robotaxi's in cars with $300,000 of equipment on roads that are precisely mapped down to the centimeter. Waymo and Cruise may have beat them to "first robotaxi" but I'm not convinced that they have anywhere near a scalable, sustainable model.
    • kibwen 2y ago
      This is analogous to saying "we're trying to avoid a local maximum where we are required to use expensive chemical propellants in order to fuel our space rockets; therefore we're going to double down on stuffing them full of larger and larger quantities of gunpowder".
  • ajross 2y ago
    That analysis only works when p is non-vanishing, though. In point of fact the "car drives into something it didn't see" failure mode doesn't really exist, or if it does it's at a level much smaller than that of the human driver its intended to replace.
    • 2y ago
• constantcrying 2y ago
  Data is just cars driving around. Mercedes Cars have cameras too. Compute power is just money, that is about the thinnest advantage you can have.
  • nojvek 2y ago
    Not everyone has billions of dollars lying around. SpaceX couldn’t have beaten ULA if that was the case. The truth is no one has the physical AI algorithm yet. Having cars equipped with cameras, big GPUs connected to can bus is the easy part. Tesla has some advantage since they are spending the most on automation compared to other car makers. However compared to Waymo, Tesla is quite behind. Waymo has done a million rider-only rides. Tesla isn’t even certified to do driverless rides. The driver has to be at the wheel and all accidents are the driver’s fault. Tesla also doesn’t take safety as seriously as Waymo. So Elon may be a net negative to the org. If the competent Tesla engineers got similar car hardware to Waymo, perhaps they could have been competitive. LiDAR solves a whole bunch of vision problems and gives extra high quality signal for processing.
    • constantcrying 2y ago
      >Not everyone has billions of dollars lying around. Mercedes can get them. So can any major car maker. Making cars is extremely capital intensive.
    • doublepg23 2y ago
      I see Teslas daily I’ve never even seen a Waymo.
    • TMWNN 2y ago
      >Not everyone has billions of dollars lying around. SpaceX couldn’t have beaten ULA if that was the case. But SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too. In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government: >If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.