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Fantastic tech that Musk hates
by MaxPock 2y ago
Fantastic tech that Musk hates
- quonn 2y agoIt‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.
- juliushuijnk 2y ago> have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.
- tgaj 2y agoTheoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.
- fragmede 2y agoIf we want the sell driving computer to be only possibly as good as a human. I can't see in the dark, can't see through fog, and have trouble with rain. Why is human visibility the bar to meet here?
- fragmede 2y agoOh and the sun. I get blinded when the sun is in my eyes at sunrise and sunset.
- tgaj 2y agoAnd how many car accidents did you cause in your life? Probably still no a lot even with your flawed vision.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoBecause we allow humans to drive, therefore if something can perform as well as a human it should be allowed. The bar is a floor, not a ceiling.
- itishappy 2y agoIn theory. In practice neither the cameras nor processors available in cars function anywhere near human level.
- vel0city 2y agoIt's not even entirely true in theory. We use a lot of our senses when driving. Force feedback on the wheel. Sounds from the environment. Inertial senses. And our vision isn't fixed, its constantly moving. And yeah, as you mention, cameras don't really have the same level of range our eyes have and computers don't operate in the same way.
- knifie_spoonie 2y agoIn practice humans aren't particularly safe drivers.
- xdmr 2y agoIs that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? Or is it due to distraction and/or poor judgment? I don't actually know the answer to this, but I assume distraction/judgment is a bigger factor. I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.
- ra7 2y ago> Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.
- tgaj 2y agoStill, millions of humans drive every night and only a miniscule percentage cause any accidents. So maybe we are not so bad at this.
- ra7 2y agoAccording to NHTSA, about half of all fatal crashes occur at night, even though only 25% of driving happens at nighttime. So yes, we are pretty bad at this.
- tgaj 2y agoI totally agree, I think most accidents are caused by human nature (especially slow reaction time in specific conditions like being tired or drunk) and ignoring laws of physics (driving too fast). And some are just a pure bad luck (something/someone getting on the road right in front of the car).
- jdhwosnhw 2y agoImagine that same reasoning applied to the car itself. Ugh, wheels?? Humans get around just fine bipedally, so cars should have legs too.
- dawnerd 2y agoExplains the Tesla robot actually
- carbotaniuman 2y agoTheory isn't really all that applicable to this though - in theory nothing is stopping anyone from writing all code in assembly, but obviously that doesn't happen. I think more practically cars have adding driver assistance feature for a while now - more cameras, blind spot monitoring, ultrasound for parking, lane drift indicators. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that adding more sensors is helpful (but even the old adage of more data is better than less would probably say that).
- tgaj 2y agoTo be honest, it's possible that having too much data can only cause problems in quick decision-making. Any redundant data will only slow down processing pipelines.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoSure, but why strive for that? We can have better than human perception by adding lidar and radar.
- ProblemFactory 2y ago> Theoretically it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit That "some kind of image processing unit" in humans has an awful lot of compute power and software. If you remove $100k of sensors but have to add $200k of compute to run more advanced computer vision software, then it's a bad tradeoff to use only cameras, even if in theory that software is possible.
- Klaus23 2y agoThis is simply not true. Let's look at the best autonomous driving features available today, i.e. level 3: Mercedes Drive Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front. BMW Personal Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front Honda SENSING Elite: Uses 5! lidars They all use lidar, and some of the placement locations are downright hideous (Mercedes EQS). I think further development will require even more/better sensors, and manufacturers tend to agree on this point.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoWhat are the benchmarks that say Mercedes, BMW, and Honda have the best level 3 features.
- fragmede 2y agoDon't forget Blue Cruise from Ford.
- Klaus23 2y agoBlue Cruise is level 2+, not 3, and does not rely on lidar.
- Klaus23 2y agoI ignore the Chinese because it is difficult to get reliable English information. Apart from those, these are the only level 3 systems available, and level 3 is the most advanced system that private individuals can currently get their hands on. Have I missed any?
- luos2 2y agoIt's not a benchmark, but there is a youtube channel (Out of Spec) which tests these systems, and I think they also say Mercedes are the best in their "Hogback challenge". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3NcHSH49Q&list=PLVa4b_Vn4gbBRwZoFf2rrenzUwsKU0jZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3NcHSH49Q&list=PLVa4b_Vn4g... Worth checking out, many cars are very bad.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 2y agoIf you want conventional car utilization where the car sits in a parking spot most of the time then the extra cost from the lidars is much more of an issue than if you're operating a fleet that is acting as taxis most of the day.
- r17n 2y agoSo there's a video of him addressing this - he doesn't hate the tech. He mentions that it's wildly expensive for cars. But, they use it heavily for SpaceX
- threeseed 2y agoThe issue isn't that it's wildly expensive for cars. But rather for Tesla. Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD. Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
- stormfather 2y agoAlso he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.
- threeseed 2y agoBased on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology. And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
- stormfather 2y agoI think they will though, I think the enormous corpus of video data and the supercluster that powers self driving development are the machine vision analog of internet scale text data that gave rise to LLMs. We'll see the same moment for vision models that text prediction models had once the data is there, where an enormous foundation model becomes much much better, especially at zero-shot tasks.
- threeseed 2y agoFSD is already using the fruits of this today with their end to end NN. And based on what we've seen the results haven't improved enough to put them close to Waymo.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kieranmaine 2y agoIn a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1]. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s
- jaimex2 2y agoThey went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.
- bobsomers 2y agoThat's a bold claim. Care to justify it?
- jaimex2 2y agoYeah, it only works in extremely controlled environments driving really slowly. The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.
- Infinitesimus 2y agoIt doesn't have to be an argument. You know what each system is good at and prioritize inputs accordingly.
- ra7 2y agoExtremely controlled environments like the entire city of San Francisco? Sensor fusion is a thing. There are no two systems that “argue with each other”. I can’t believe the same old ignorant tropes are still making rounds.
- coolspot 2y agoWaymos don’t drive slowly, I don’t know where you’re getting this from. If anything, they drive too fast for a thing without a driver.
- jaimex2 2y agoMusk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong. There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
- itishappy 2y agoTime of flight ranging is used in nature by bats and whales/dolphins.
- fragmede 2y agoand humans! https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate
- password4321 2y ago2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160071 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334
- maxbond 2y agoMy back of the napkin estimate is that a human using time of flight ranging would be unable to distinguish between an object directly in front of their face and 8.6 meters away[1]. I think human echolocation uses a different mechanism (presumably relating to amplitude)? Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting. (As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.) There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did. (I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.) [1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation [3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/19632.pdf https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...
- UltraSane 2y agoBecause Musk thinks is much much smarter than he actually is and refuses to listen to anyone. And between how many people he fired at Twitter, Tesla, and soon the US Federal Government I think he gets off on it.