7 ms·
The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be b
by xbmcuser 2y ago
The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Why the fuck would you want ai cars to be the same as humans you should want them to be many times better and radarr/lidar sonarr type tech make them better
- energy123 2y agoMultiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2). Now the errors are not all independent so it's not as good as that, but many classes of errors are independent (e.g. two pilots getting a heart attack versus just one) so you can get pretty close to that p^n. Musk did not understand this. He's just not as smart as he's made out to be.
- Gud 2y agoNot at all. The car should be smart enough to figure out which sensor is faulty. Otherwise, the car should not be driving itself at all. It's more like, a pilot has access to multiple sensors. Which they do.
- swid 2y agoThe comment you are replying to is saying the chance of error decreases with more pilots since there is redundancy. They are not saying it’s like too many chefs in a kitchen.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Volundr 2y agoI think you and GP are in agreement. If you have a sensor with a really bad .5 chance of failure, by having to your chance of failure decreases to 0.5^2=0.25.
- throwaway31131 2y agoif fails are independent...
- Volundr 2y agoRight, that was also discussed in the comment.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- timschmidt 2y agoI thought it was consensus that the move away from lidar was driven by a lack of supply compared to desired EV production numbers, and the things said about making vision only work have all been about coping with that reality.
- artursapek 2y agoThey didn't let lack of battery supply stop them.
- timschmidt 2y agoI can imagine a useful EV without lidar (my ICE vehicles certainly don't have one). I cannot imagine a useful EV without a battery.
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoI can't imagine a "full self driving" car that performs worse than humans be allowed in the streets. In medicine, the ethics commitee would shot the project early. Edit: Comparing "ev vehicle" with "autonomous vehicle"
- timschmidt 2y agoI wouldn't use medicine as an example in this case. Medicine does all kinds of ill advised things because they're worse for the disease than the patient. And all kinds of things they know will kill the patient if there's opportunity to learn and improve other lives. It seems like Tesla's been pretty clear with drivers who've opted in to FSD that they're helping to test and develop a system which isn't perfect. Just off the top of the head, look up Henrietta Lacks for a notable example of how medicine has handled informed consent.
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago> "It seems like Tesla's been pretty clear with drivers who've opted in to FSD that they're helping to test and develop a system which isn't perfect." Strawman No matter how many contracts and disclaimers they get in their favor. The "Full self driving" system is causing accidents (and deaths) Turn lights, rearview cameras, safety belts, all exist and are regulated to prevent the manufacturer dumping responsibility on the drivers. I emphasize "Full self driving" Tesla brand because the name was declared unlawful in California. https://www.govtech.com/policy/new-california-law-bans-tesla-from-advertising-as-fully-self-driving https://www.govtech.com/policy/new-california-law-bans-tesla...
- NoTeslaThrow 2y agoI'm not really following the attempt at logic here but under this logic surely you'd WANT multiple types of sensors for all the same reasons.
- monktastic1 2y agoYes, that's what it's saying.
- Havoc 2y ago>Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane. Don't think that's the right analogy. Realistically you'd aim to combine them meaningfully. A bit like two eyes gives you depth perception. You assume 1+1 is less than two, when really you'd aim for >2
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dawnerd 2y agoThat’s the thing, they’re already merging multiple data streams (cameras) and dealing with visual anomalies. Pretty nonsense they can’t figure out different sensors when other companies are doing it just fine.
- Izkata 2y agoI remember this being his reasoning for it, that the lidar should be unnecessary if they could get multi-camera depth perception to work like it does in humans.
- sudosysgen 2y agoBut it won't with current camera technology. The mix of high acuity at the center, moveable camera, wide peripheral vision, object tracking and non-frame-based sensing that allows human eyes to sense the depth of moving objects in low light is not commercially available with camera systems under ~10000$. It's cheaper to install LIDAR than to install cameras which are uniformly as good as the human eye. To get the acuity of a human eye at the center you'd need ~400MPx, or have a gimbaled camera to point towards an object of interest, and tracking small fast objects with such a camera (and at night!) is very very expensive in hardware.
- ravenstine 2y agoI dunno because I'm pretty sure that each sense a person loses increases their risk of mortality. If what you are saying is true, then shouldn't we all be better off wearing blinders, a clothespin over our noses, and rely on echolocation?
- jfengel 2y agoI misread your first sentence, in that having multiple pilots is not necessarily a good thing, like multiple cooks. You have a main and a backup pilot, but either one must be 100% capable of doing it on their own. The backup is silently double checking, but their assignments are more about ensuring that the copilot doesn't just check out because they're human. If the copilot ever has to say "don't do that it's going to kill us all" it's a crisis. Lidar is a good backup but the car must be able to with without it. You can't drive just with lidar; it's like driving by Braille. Lidar can't even read a stop light. If they cannot handle it with just the visuals, the car should be not be allowed on the road. I concur that is terrifying that he was allowed to go without the backup that stops it from killing people. Human co drivers are not a good enough backup. But he's also not wrong that the visual system must be practically perfect -- if it's possible at all. Which it surely isn't yet.
- Retric 2y agoCars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety. If the lidar normally has very good uptime but happens to break, you need to safely come to a complete stop and that’s basically it. Trusting vision systems for 30 seconds or even 30 minutes over the lifetime of a car is very different than trusting them for 30,000 hours. So for edge cases sure, add a “this is an emergency drive to a hospital without LiDAR” mode but you don’t need to handle normal driving without them.
- larvaetron 2y ago> Cars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety. They do if they're crossing railroad tracks.
- david38 2y agoA narrow case easily accounted for
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 2y ago> Musk did not understand this. more likely he is a ruthless ** who doesn't care about people dying and slightly increasing the profit margin is for him worth more then a some people dying regulators/law allowing self driving companies to wriggle out of responsibility didn't help either lidar was interesting for him as long as it seemed light Tesla could maybe dominate the self driving marked through technological excellency the moment it was clear it won't work he abandoned technological excellence in favor of micro optimizing profit at the cost of read safety which shouldn't be surprising for anyone I mean he also micro optimized workplace safety in SpaceX away not only until it killed someone but even after it did (stuff like this is why there where multiple investigations against his companies until Trump magiced them away) the thing is he has intelligent people informing him about stuff, including how removing lidar will statistically seen kill people, so it's not that he doesn't know, it's that he doesn't care
- FireBeyond 2y agoRight, he despises environmental regulations because he’s “trying to get us to a new home”, so who cares what happens to this one? Especially if it delays him doing so. Someone said in an interview “Elon desperately wants the world saved. But only if by him.”
- janice1999 2y ago> “Elon desperately wants the world saved. But only if by him.” I believe that's also Lex Luthor's motivation in All Star (?) Superman.
- ddq 2y agoEarth is the only home, any other planetary body would be akin to homelessness. Words cannot adequately express the sheer small-minded ignorance of these feckless technocrats, the unadulterated hubris to presume themselves remotely capable of surpassing eons of biospheric development with their fucking spaghetti code that can't even drive a car properly. With such a level of dangerous stupidity posing an existential threat to all life in this solar system, it is nothing short of the gravest immorality to allow such a dim-witted, mean-spirited, drugged-out, misguided moron to remain in a position of power and control. There is no planet B.
- vitus 2y agoI think that's an oversimplification, and helps mainly in the case where one sensor is totally offline. If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? What if the one that says you're about to crash is feeding you bad data? And what if the resulting course correction leads to a different failure? I'd hope that we've learned these lessons from the 737 Max crashes. In both cases, one sensor thought that the plane was at imminent risk of stalling, and so it forced the nose of the plane down, thereby leading to an entirely different failure mode. Now, of course, having two sensors is better than just having the one faulty sensor. But it's worth emphasizing that not all sensor failures are created equal. And of course, it's important to monitor your monitoring.
- breadwinner 2y ago> If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? Neither. You stop the car and tow it to the nearest repair facility. (Or have a human driver take over until the fault is repaired.)
- Spooky23 2y agoThe Elon magic is getting people to bikeshed bullshit like this and ignore the bigger issues. You don’t gouge out your ears because you hear something walking around at night that doesn’t appear to be accurate. As a human, your executive function makes judgements based on context and what you know. Your eyesight is degraded in the dark, so your brain pays more attention to unexpected sound. The argument for lidar, sonar or radar isn’t that cameras are “bad”, it’s that they perform very well in circumstances where visual input may not. As an engineer, you have an ethical obligation to consider the use case of the product. It’s not at all like the 737max issue - many companies have been able to successfully implement these features I have a almost decade old Honda that uses camera and radar sensors to manage adaptive cruise and lane keeping features flawlessly. In the case of Tesla and their dear leader, they tend to make dogmatic engineering decisions based on personal priorities. They then spackle in legal and astroturf marketing bullshit to dodge accountability. The folly of relying on cameras or putting your headlights inside of a narrow cavity in the car body (cybertruck) is pretty obvious if you live in a place that has winter weather and road salt.
- treis 2y agoHe's just saying whatever will let him sell cars.
- throwaway31131 2y agoDoes that mean a Tesla only has one camera? If not, you're dealing with "multiple independent sensor streams" regardless.
- lukeschlather 2y agoI drive a beater used car, I've contemplated installing aftermarket lidar on it, i don't want to drive as a human only relying on being able to see everything by turning my head.
- CalChris 2y agoRadar. I remember some of his nonsense about disambiguating, despite the previous AP disambiguating just fine. Same with the rain sensor. This is a cheap part. Radar isn't very expensive either. To be fair, the ghost brakes on TACC have reduced. But I tend to control my wipers with voice.
- dawnerd 2y agoI still get just as much phantom breaking. I’ve narrowed it down to the car using map speed limit data and losing track of where it is. It’s very consistent on 5 south in LA. The same spot every day.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoYou do want them to be better than humans, but vision quality is not really a major source of human accidents. Accidents are typically caused by driving technique, inattention, or a failure to accurately model the behavior of other drivers. Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? The issue here is that the vision based system failed to even match human capabilities, which is a different issue from whether it can be better than humans by using some different vision tech.
- hughw 2y agoYes?
- luckylion 2y agoWill limiting auto-pilots to human-level vision not increase their accident rate?
- NoTeslaThrow 2y ago> but vision quality is not really a major source of human accidents. Never driven before?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gruez 2y agoI've driven before, and agree with the OP. Now what?
- ruined 2y agolet's experiment. i'll reduce your vision quality, then you try driving
- gruez 2y agoIt's pretty obvious from the context of the thread that "vision quality" refers to LIDAR vs cameras, and that human vision is good enough, not that being legally blind doesn't somehow doesn't affect driving quality.
- moralestapia 2y ago>This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. That was Karpathy's decision [1] and, yes, I also have that perception of him. I know this is not going to be well received because he's one of HN's pet prodigies but, objectively, it was him. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former-head-of-tesla-ai-explains-why-theyve-removed-sensors-others-differ/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former... (one of many)
- breadwinner 2y agoFrom the article: While Elon Musk is best known for making statements on this, Karpathy was his go-to guy on backing up that reasoning. I read that as Musk wanted this done and asked Karpathy to find a way.
- moralestapia 2y agohttps://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1900941701587370296 https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1900941701587370296 Seems to me that the guy is pretty convinced, but sure your mind belongs to you and you can make it whatever you want, maybe Musk was behind with a gun, who knows.
- liendolucas 2y ago> instead he is a fraud/charlatan and... Just see him talking about things at NeuraLink. Musk wouldn't exist if it weren't for the people working for him. It's a clown that made it to the top in a very dubious way.
- glitchc 2y agoNot dubious. He was rich to begin with and used that wealth to make more.
- ravenstine 2y agoYes, though he wouldn't be relevant if people didn't believe he is a genius.
- dboreham 2y agoDubious about that. I think people thought he had a bunch of money, so did things for him in exchange for some of that money.
- glitchc 2y agoHis father's profile: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errol_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errol_Musk
- crote 2y agoA lot of people believe you need to be a hard-working genius to get rich, so anyone rich must logically be a hard-working genius. Similarly, they believe anyone poor must be a lazy idiot. In reality getting rich has more to do with opportunity, connections, and luck - but accepting that means you've got to accept that the American Dream has always been a lie. It's much easier to convince yourself that people like Elon are geniuses.
- plun9 2y agoWhat's wrong with him talking about things at Neuralink?
- rayiner 2y ago> The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Yeah, he was arguably wrong about one thing so his building both the world's leading EV company and the world's leading private rocket company was fake. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably now xAI, the probability of Musk's genius being a fluke or fraud is close to zero.
- watwut 2y agoHe was not wrong about one thing, he was frequently wrong. He is highly charizmatic bullshitter that gets away with fraud and lies, that can secure help from people when he needs. But, he is frequently wrong, it just does not matter. He was occasionally right, like with Tesla back then.
- stephenapple 2y agoOf total road deaths per year, 14% are Motorcycles, and the 5 Tesla fatalities are 0.0008% of motorcycle deaths. I think a more poignant subject is how did they have us arguing over this so quickly? Most posts are just anti-Elon. Boggling...
- fzeroracer 2y ago> probability of Musk's genius being a fluke or fraud is close to zero. We already know he's an objective fraud because he literally cheats at video games and was caught cheating. As in, he hired people to play for him and then pretended the accomplishments were his own. Which maps very well to literally everything he's done.
- LMYahooTFY 2y agoI guess I just have to accept that for the foreseeable future, any article in any way related to Elon Musk will result in a lot of angry low quality comments that get lots of upvotes. Instead of critiquing the article for liberal use of words like "overwhelmingly", "unique", and " 100% of Teslas" on an n=5 cars, with limited data and a very questionable analysis of the Snohomish accident, we discuss how Musk is a fraud.
- toddmorey 2y agoThis was purely an effort to improve margins on the cars that they tried to sell with other types of rationale. From the way I've seen him operate his companies, treat his employees, and now work with the government, he has a high tolerance for risk paired with a very low tolerance for perceived inefficiencies plus too little patience to fully understand the problem. He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and break things". So let's fire 80% of the staff, see what falls down, and rehire where we made "mistakes". I really think he has an alarmingly high threshold for the number of lives we can lose if it accelerates the pace of progress.
- Ygg2 2y agoTo quote Black Adder: Some of you may die, but some of us will live!
- throw0101d 2y ago"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." — Lord Farquaad, Shrek, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/characters/nm0001475?item=qt0398103 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/characters/nm0001475?it...
- smallmancontrov 2y agoThe irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.
- daveguy 2y ago[citation needed] Tesla releases all self driving statistics including time since disengagement of self-driving before accident, right?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Workaccount2 2y agoIt's because the sensor suite for lidar is expensive and HD cameras are basically a commodity at this point. So if your goal is to pump out $20k self driving cars, then you need cameras to be good enough. So the logic becomes "If humans can do it, so can cameras, otherwise we have no product, no promise."
- breadwinner 2y agoCameras have poor dynamic range and can be easily blinded by bright surfaces. While it is true that humans do fine with only eyes, our eyes are significantly better than cameras. More importantly, expectations are higher when an automated system is driving the car. It is not sufficient if, in aggregate, self-driving cars have fewer accidents. If you lose a loved one in an accident where the accident could have been easily avoided if a human was driving, then you're not going to be mollified to hear that in aggregate, fewer people are being killed by self-driving cars! You'd be outraged to hear such a justification! The expectation therefore is that in each individual injury accident a human clearly could not have handled the situation any better. Self-driving cars have to be significantly better than humans to be accepted by society, and that means it has to have better-than-human levels of vision (which lidars provide).
- josephcsible 2y agoHow many strangers' lives is a loved one's life worth? If your answer is anything other than "1", how does that square with other people having their own loved ones, and your loved ones being strangers to them?
- breadwinner 2y agoDon't understand your point. Everyone's life is important, which is why I said: the expectation is that in each individual injury accident a human clearly could not have handled the situation any better. It is insufficient for self-driving cars to be as safe as, or even slightly better than human drivers. Which is why, better-than-human sensors are needed.
- turnsout 2y agoHis biographer estimates his IQ is 100-110. [0] [0] https://x.com/SethAbramson/status/1892710698683142638
- ModernMech 2y agoI'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept. Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human inference engine that allowed human drivers to work, we would have to rely on highly-precise measurement instruments like LiDAR instead. Musk's huge error was in thinking "Well humans have eyes and those are kind of like cameras, therefore all you need are cameras to drive" But no! Eyes are not cameras, they are extensions of our brains. And we use more than our eyes to navigate roads, in fact there's a huge social aspect to driving. It's not just an engineering challenge but a social one. So from the get-go he's solving the wrong problem. I knew this guy was full of it when he started talking about driverless cars being 5 years out in 2015. Just utter nonsense to anyone who was actually in that field, especially if he thought he could do it without LiDAR. He called his system "autopilot" which was deceptive, but I was completely off him when he released "full self driving - beta" onto public streets. Reckless insanity. What made me believe he is criminally insane is this particular timeline (these are headlines, you can search them if you want to read the stories): 2016 - Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says 2016 - Tesla working on Autopilot radar changes after crash 2017 - NTSB Issues Final Report and Comments on Fatal Tesla Autopilot Crash 2019 - Tesla didn’t fix an Autopilot problem for three years, and now another person is dead 2021 - Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars Tesla announces transition to ‘Tesla Vision’ without radar, warns of limitations at first 2022 - Former Head Of Tesla AI Explains Why They’ve Removed Sensors; Others Differ 2022 - Tesla Dropping Radar Was a Mistake, Here is Why 2023 - Tesla reportedly saw an uptick in crashes and mistakes after Elon Musk removed radar from its cars 2023 - Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar Would Be Problematic: Report 2023 - How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course 2023 - The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash Now I get to add TFA to the chronical. The man and his cars are a menace to society. Tesla would be so much further along on driverless cars without Musk.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoI mean what does lidar do but tell you distance? A rangefinder optic from 1940 can also tell you distance with two little offset windows purely optically and accurately. Millions of rolls of films shot on this principle of optical distance finding. And yet, this is no good now, because IMO its musks idea and thats enough to poison it among the armchair engineers than any other reason. Telling to this point is how everyone just parrots the same comment that optical self driving is bad without actually providing evidence to support their point. Just arguing on precedent established in forums and social media.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoEveryone is harping on the engineering. It is a marketing reason first and foremost. Lidar units are ugly as hell. No consumer would ever buy one of those waymo jaguars even if its better if tesla can do 95% of that without looking like a beluga whale.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xhkkffbf 2y agoI can see that cutting out the LIDAR could qualify as "cheap." And maybe he's being risky on betting on lowering the cost by simplifying the technology. But why make the jump to "fraud/charlatan"? Every system needs to be finite. We can invest in every bell and whistle. Furthermore, he's upfront about the decision. Fraud requires deception.
- hatsix 2y agoAccording to Musk, my car was supposed to be unsupervised driving by now. The shift to vision only has consumed all of their resources for the past several years, and my car has been left behind. There have been giant leaps in vision only, but it still isn't better than the vision+radar. So, I was deceived. I didn't buy the car because of the deception, but I did buy FSD because of it. Also, FSD disengaging when it gets sensor confusion should be considered criminal fraud. FSD should never disengage without a driver action.
- stephc_int13 2y agoI fully agree on this. Computer Vision has turned out to be a very tough nut to crack and that should have been visible from anyone doing serious work in the field since at least 15 years ago. In any case, any safety critical system should be build with redundancy in mind, with several sub systems working independently. Using more and better sensors is only a problem when building a cost sensitive system, not a safety critical one, and very often those sensors are expensive because they are niche, that can be mediated with mass scale.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoData point. The only lidar equipped car in US is volvo ex90 which sold 3k cars in almost a year. Lidar is not enabled yet.
- EasyMark 2y agoGood point. You don't get rid of a technology that improves your results drastically until you have a replacment. His visual systems are still a failure when compared to lidar based ones. Just see how well other self driving systems are doing in comparison.