8 ms·

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anythin

• mvdtnz 2y ago
  Your objection to him claiming a win on self driving is that you think that we can still define cars as self driving even when humans are operating them? Ok I disagree. If humans are operating them then they simply are not self driving by any sensible definition.
  • sashank_1509 2y ago
    Human interventions are some non zero number in current self driving cars and will likely be that way for a while. Does this mean self driving is a scam and in fact it is just a human driving, and that these are actually ADAS. Maybe in some pedantic sense, you are right but then your definition is not useful, since it lumps cruise control/ lane-keeping ADAS and Waymo’s in the same category. Waymo is genuinely, qualitatively a big improvement above any ADAS/ self driving system that we have seen. I suspect Rodney did not predict even Waymo’s to be possible, but gave himself enough leeway so that he can pedantically argue that Waymo’s are just ADAS and that his prediction was right.
    • mvdtnz 2y ago
      No one said scam (although in the case of Tesla it absolutely is). It's just not a solved problem yet.
      • jdminhbg 2y ago
        > It's just not a solved problem yet. Human driving isn't a solved problem either; the difference is that when a human driver needs intervention it just crashes.
        • tsimionescu 2y ago
          This is not about crashes. By all accounts, the Waymo cars are mostly fully self driving, I beleive even the article author agrees with that. This includes crash avoidance, to the extent that they can. The remote operation seems to be more about navigational issues and reading the road conditions. Things like accidentally looping, or not knowing how to proceed with an unexpected obstacle. Things that don't really happen to human drivers, even the greenest of new drivers.
          • jdminhbg 2y ago
            Ok, but crashes are much worse than navigational issues or accidentally looping. It’s only status quo bias that makes us think driving is more solved if you get the accidental looping fixed before the crashing.
            • tsimionescu 2y ago
              Only true up to some extent. If a car can't get you anywhere, then crashing is almost irrelevant: you won't use it, because there's nothing to be gained from that. A car looping around in a parking lot is extremely safe, but completely useless.
        • mvdtnz 2y ago
          Irrelevant.
  • Spivak 2y ago
    Yeah, I think semi-autonomous vehicles are a huge milestone and should be celebrated but the jump from semi-autonomous to fully-autonomous will, I think, feel noticeably different. It will be a moment future generations have trouble imagining a world where drunk or tired driving was ever even an issue.
    • fragmede 2y ago
      The future is here, just unevenly distributed. There are already people that don't have that issue, thanks to technology. That technology might be Waymo and not driving in the first place, or the technology might be smartphones and the Internet, which enables Uber/Lyft to operate. Some of them might use older technologies like concrete which enables people to live more densely and not have to drive to get to the nearest liquor establishment.
  • munchler 2y ago
    You can make exactly the opposite argument as well: You think that we can still define cars as human-driven even when they have self-driving features (e.g. lane keeping). If the car is self-driving in even the smallest way, then they simply are not human-operated by any sensible definition.
    • skywhopper 2y ago
      No one is making predictions or selling stock in the amount of “fully human controlled” vehicles.
• gwern 2y ago
  The Waymo criticisms are absurd to the point of dishonesty. He criticizes a Waymo for... not pulling out fast enough around a truck, or for human criminals vandalizing them? Oh no, once some Waymos did a weird thing where they honked for a while! And a couple times they got stuck over a few million miles! This is an amazingly lame waste of space, and the fact that he does his best to only talk about Tesla instead of Waymo emphasizes how weak his arguments are, particularly in comparison to his earliest predictions. (Obviously only the best self-driving car matters to whether self-driving cars have been created.) "Nothing ever happens"... until it does, and it seems Brooks's prediction roundups can now be conveniently replaced with a little rock on it with "nothing in AI ever works" written on it without anything of value being lost.
  • davedx 2y ago
    Interesting, that wasn't my takeaway from the article at all! Direct quote from the article: > Then I will weave them together to explain how it is still pretty much business as usual, and I mean that in a good way, with steady progress on both the science and engineering of AI. There are some extremely emotional defences of Waymo on this comment thread. I don't quite understand why? Are they somehow inviolable to constructive criticism in the SV crowd?
  • elicksaur 2y ago
    It’s interesting that in my reading of the post I felt like he hardly talked about Tesla at all. He calls out that Tesla FSD has been “next year” for 11 years, but then the vast majority of the self-driving car section is about Cruise and Waymo. He also minorly mentions Tesla’s promise of a robotaxi service and how it is unlikely to be materially different than Cruise/Waymo. The amount of space allocated to each made sense as I read it. For the meat of the issue: I can regularly drive places without someone else intervening. If someone else had to intervene in my driving 1/100 miles, even 1/1000 miles, most would probably say I shouldn’t have a license. Yes, getting stuck behind a parked car or similar scenario is a critical flaw. It seems simple and non-important because it is not dangerous, but it means the drive would not be completed without a human. If I couldn’t drive to work because there was a parked car on my home street, again, people would question whether I should be on the road, and I’d probably be fired.
• laweijfmvo 2y ago
  Waymo is the best driver I’ve ridden with. Yes it has limited coverage. Maybe humans are intervening, but unless someone can prove that humans are intervening multiple times per ride, “self driving” is here, IMO, as of 2024.
  • Denzel 2y ago
    In what sense is self-driving “here” if the economics alone prove that it can’t get “here”? It’s not just limited coverage, it’s practically non-existent coverage, both nationally and globally, with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in.
    • AlotOfReading 2y ago
      It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.
      • ivanbalepin 2y ago
        Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of about 95+% of Bay Area residents.
        • AlotOfReading 2y ago
          Waymo's current operational area in the bay runs from Sunnyvale to fisherman's wharf. I don't know how many people that is, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it a big chunk of the bay. They don't run to SFO because SF hasn't approved them for airport service.
• benreesman 2y ago
  Waymo cars can drive. Everything from the (limited) public literature to riding them personally has me totally persuaded that they can drive. DeepMind RL/MCTS can succeed in fairly open-ended settings like StarCraft and shit. Brain/DeepMind still knocks hard. They under-invested in LLMs and remain kind of half-hearted around it because they think it’s a dumbass sideshow because it is a dumbass sideshow. They train on TPU which costs less than chips made of Rhodium like a rapper’s sunglasses, they fixed the structural limits in TF2 and PyTorch via the Jax ecosystem. If I ever get interested in making some money again Google is the only FAANG outfit I’d look at.
  • tylerflick 2y ago
    I can tell you as someone that crosses paths almost everyday with a Waymo car, they absolutely due work. I would describe their driving behavior as very safe and overly cautious. I’m far more concerned of humans behind the wheel.
    • benreesman 2y ago
      I especially love how they can go fast when it’s safe and slow when the error bars go up even a little. It’s like being in the back seat of Nikki Lauda’s car.
      • Bootvis 2y ago
        As shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVZ8NyV4pXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVZ8NyV4pXU
        • benreesman 2y ago
          Perfect clip out of all of YouTube.
  • fouronnes3 2y ago
    Does Waymo run on JAX?
  • 2y ago
• khafra 2y ago
  > So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo Just to make sure we're applying our rubric fairly and universally: Has anyone else been in an Uber where you wished you were able to intervene in the driving a few times, or at least apply RLHF to the driver? (In other words: Waymo may be imperfect to the point where corrections are sometimes warranted; that doesn't mean they're not already driving at a superhuman level, for most humans. Just because there is no way for remote advisors to provide better decisions for human drivers doesn't mean that human-driven cars would not benefit from that, if it were available.).
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    To apply this benchmark, you'd have to believe that Waymo is paying operators to improve the quality of the ride, not to make the ride possible at all. That is, you'd have to believe that the fully autonomous car works and gets you to your destination safely and in a timely manner (at the level of a median professional human driver), but Waymo decided that's not good enough and hired operators to improve beyond that. This seems very unlikely to me, and some of the (few) examples I've seen online were about correcting significant failures, such as waiting behind a parked truck indefinitely (as if it were stopped at a red light) or looping around aimlessly in a parking lot. You'd also have to believe that when you wished to change how your Uber driver drove, you'd actually have improved things rather than worsened them.
    • lukeschlather 2y ago
      Let's suppose Waymo's fully automated stuff has tenfold-fewer fatal collisions than a human. There's no way to avoid the fatal accidents a human causes, and the solution to Waymos getting stuck sometimes is simple. The point is that the Waymo can actually be described as superior to a human driver, and the fact that its errors can be corrected with review is a feature and not a bug - they optimize for those kinds of errors rather than unrecoverable ones.
• tsimionescu 2y ago
  I think that, if it were true that Waymo cars require human intervention every 1-2 miles (thus requiring 1 operator for every, say, 1-2 cars, probably constantly paying attention while the car is in motion), then it would be fair to say that the cars are not really self driving. However, if the real number is something like an intervention every 20 or 100 miles, and so an operator is likely passively monitoring dozens of cars, and the cars themselves ask for operator assistance rather than the operator actively monitoring them, then I would agree with you that Waymo has really achieved full self driving and his predicitons on the basic viability have turned out wrong. I have no idea though which is the case. I would be very interested if there are any reliable resources pointing one way or the other.
  • skywhopper 2y ago
    I disagree that regular interventions every two trips where you have no control over pickup or dropoff points counts as full self driving. But that definition doesn’t even matter. The key factor is whether the additional overhead, whatever percentage it is, makes economic sense for the operator or the customer. And it seems pretty clear the economics aren’t there yet.
• 4ndrewl 2y ago
  Nonsense. If you spoke about self-driving cars a few decades ago you would have understood it to have meant that you could go to a dealer and buy a car that would drive itself, wherever you might be, without your input as a driver. No-one would have equated the phrase "we'll have self-driving cars" with "some taxis in a few of US cities"
  • Schiendelman 2y ago
    That's how all innovation works. Ford never said people asked for a faster horse, but the theory holds. It doesn't matter what benchmarks you set, the market finds an interesting way to satisfy people's needs.
  • bhelkey 2y ago
    The prediction is: > First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day. Their 2025 analysis is: "This is unlikely to happen in the first half of this century." The prediction is clear. The evaluation is dishonest.
    • throw-qqqqq 2y ago
      I agree.. Waymo sells +150k rides every week according to Alphabet’s Q3 2024 earnings announcement. Yes they need human assistance once in a while. I know of plenty other automation that needs to be tickled or rebooted periodically to work, that most would still say works automatically. Maybe he has a very narrow or strict definition of ‘driverless’. That would explain the “not in this half of the century”-sentiment. I mean, it’s 25 years!
• littlestymaar 2y ago
  > when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him Honestly, back in 2012 or something I was convinced that we would have autonomous driving by now, and by autonomous driving I definitely didn't mean “one company is able to offer autonomous taxi rides is a very limited amount of places with remote operator supervision”, the marketing pitch has always been something along “the car you'll buy will be autonomously driving you to whatever destination you ask for, and you'll be just a passenger in you own car”, and we definitely aren't there at all when all we have is Waymo.