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Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car

Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran off the road, with zero finishing the race. Top minds from MIT and Stanford got us that result. But they held the challenge again and again, and 20 years later we have consumers making trips in robo taxis. e.g. Kyle Vogt, participated in the 2004 Grand Challenge while he was at MIT, went on to found Cruise using exactly the techniques that were developed at the competition. So while Elon Musk is busy slashing whatever federal spending he can through DOGE, it's only because of federal spending that he can even fantasize about launching a robot taxi service.

bilbo0s 1y ago
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- ausbah 1y ago
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  - TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
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    - cmontella 1y ago
      If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because... they're not confident it can actually self-drive.
      - TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
        where did i say i wasn't supervising? Are you saying the self-summon is the unsupervised part? Cause i can flip that logic on it's head and say, if they weren't confident that it can summon to me, why would they implement the feature?
        cmontella 1y ago
        The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is not sufficient for self driving, i.e. they're not doing it successfully.
        TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
        Waymo taxi's are always in geofenced areas with full HD maps down to the centimeter. I can't take it to tahoe like i can with my Tesla. my point is... my tesla drives itself... all the time and never have to disengage. People can shout technicalities all the time, and regulations where tesla fails because it "Doesn't have an operator that can take over" but for all intents and purposes, my car drives itself from my door to tahoe and back without me having to take over a single time. If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
        cmontella 1y ago
        > for all intents and purposes What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attention. Which is the core function of self-driving, so not being able to do it is kind of whole thing. > If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree. Geofenced or not, self driving is about not having to pay attention while the vehicle is in motion. If you have to supervise it, that's a very different thing from a system that will all you to looking at your phone or sleep. Tesla's approach of trying to drive everywhere instead of a geofenced area is part of why their system is failing to deliver self driving. Trying to do one thing well before expanding the performance envelope is good systems engineering practice. But Tesla has been widely testing their systems on the greater public, which has tragically resulted in deaths. This is why at the end of the day Tesla requires you to supervise their system while you operate it.
    - hengheng 1y ago
      So if it crashes, then it's Tesla's fault and they pay? Or do you pay?
      - bilbo0s 1y ago
        Pretty sure what that commenter claims to be doing is illegal. At least in my state. And, he would be liable if that's what you're asking. Tesla, at no time, claimed that their vehicles should be used in that fashion.
        tstrimple 1y ago
        All "full self driving" cars right now have "disengagements" where a human operator has to take over. https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-driving-tests-in-california-have-fewest-human-interventions-idUSKBN1FL3VX/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-drivi... > Disengagements occur when the self-driving system is deactivated with control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention. > Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements. > The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co, which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles. Notice that Tesla isn't even included. That's because they don't actually have full self driving tests ongoing like this. Just the half-assed version they beta test with their customers on public roads.
      - TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
        If it crashes, it's my fault. At every point i'm supervising. Except in self summon, and if it side swipes the car on the way out, it's obviously still my fault. That's just never happened to me. Where in my sentence did i say I wasn't fully in control of the situation? I just say i very, very rarely even have to disengage in situations. On the very rare occassion that i do disengage, it's not really that the car is going to put me in a life threatening situation, it kinda just stops... and tweeks out a bit. Mainly at some super wierd triangle intersection in some of the small towns along the california coast. Honestly i've come to "feel" the car after using it. I'll disengage if i even have a shadow of a doubt it's not going to work, and in situations where i've seen it "fail" before. It might have accomplished it, but instead i just drive through the wierd intersection and reengage. This has already turned into a rant, but one last point; Have you driven in the other cars in Austin? They do the same thing. When it tweaks, or thinks it might tweak, they patch over to a human who takes control of the car.
    - danso 1y ago
      Are the Teslas in the Vegas Boring Loop still driven by humans? If so, how is it that Tesla seems unwilling to assume liability for what has to be one of the simplest driving tasks?
    - bumby 1y ago
      Just curious, but if it really was up to full self driving, why don't you think Tesla would have it certified as such? Being first to market as a true self driving vehicle would be a huge business win.
    - freejazz 1y ago
      I don't think it's fair to call a car self-driving if the self-driving disengages itself every time its about to get into a nasty wreck because of its own actions. It's facially "self-driving except for when it's not", the "not" times you, of course, cannot predict.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - standardUser 1y ago
      Tesla has never sold a single driverless taxi ride because it does not have sufficient self-driving technology. They're trying, they're just failing.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > Teslas are self driving on the roads everyday. Name one jursidiction where Teslas are allowed to operate on public roads without a human driver on the wheel. Because other people are doing that commercially, because they have demonstrated capacities that Tesla has not.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        Well that is a goal post. They can do it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to or not. My friends tesla I’ve seen it in action. It goes on the highway. It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. It can even find a free parking spot in the lot and fully park the car. All while he does nothing at all with his hands on his lap. So yeah it totally can self drive.
        warkdarrior 1y ago
        > It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. Waymo has been autonomously driving throughout San Francisco and its many hills for years.
- ponow 1y ago
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  - roywiggins 1y ago
    Tesla also started without Musk.
    - ponow 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - MPSFounder 1y ago
        It speaks volumes tho that one of his clauses was to be treated as a co-founder. He clearly has a chip on his shoulder, and his technical abilities are to be questioned. Ultimately, people choose to believe Elon is smart or a good guy (saving the environment etc.). I think he is a remarkable conman. He was able to convince remarkable engineers to work on these products under the pretext of saving the environment, while paying relatively low wages (a few years ago Tesla pay was not comparable to other car manufacturers despite its California location). Also, I find it really funny that he was illegal in the US for a few months, and currently opposes immigration the way he does. Regarldess of your views on these matters, any man that takes a piece of the pie (subsidies, immigration etc.) and denies it to the next person is either a conman or a hypocrite, or both. I think he is a conman, who knows the next person will resort to tactics similar to his, and wants to avoid it. He never cared about the environment, given he is doing everything in his power to kill other EVs and maximize his own profits. There are many skeletons in the Musk and Thiel closets, enough to fill a graveyard. Hypocrisy is truly seen as a virtue in DC
  - organsnyder 1y ago
    SpaceX depends _massively_ on government contracts.
  - nxobject 1y ago
    As opposed to governments currently trying to lure Tesla in with subsidies, preferential tariff policy, etc.? (And, FWIW, an early source of revenue for Tesla _was_ subsidies. https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/tesla-motors-government-income/ https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/tesla-motors-gover...)
ponow 1y ago
It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success. I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop demonizing private accumulations of capital, "ending" billionaires and "monopolies" that are offering more things at lower cost. Small enterprises cannot afford a Bell Labs, a Watson Research, a Deep Mind, a Xerox PARC, etc.
- regularization 1y ago
  Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey. It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.
  - absolutelastone 1y ago
    I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions. I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.
    - Frost1x 1y ago
      I wonder if it deals more with the approachability of software applications. If I even begin to think I’d compete with NVIDIA delivering similar hardware, I’d very quickly realize I was an idiot. Meanwhile as a single individual, there is still a reasonable amount of commercial markets of software I really do have some chance at tackling or competing against. As software complexity rises it’s becoming far less tractable than it was in say the 90s but there are still areas individuals and small sums of capital can enter. I think that makes the sector alluring in general. Hardware is just in general capital intensive, not even including all the intellectual capital needed. So it’s not that it’s uninteresting or even a commodity to me, it’s just a stone wall that whatever is there is there and that’s it in my mind.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
SpaceX was also partly funded by DARPA in its early years, without which, together with other DOD funding, it would likely not have survived.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
America the leader in the driverless car industry? Not entirely sure it is still true. At least might not be true much longer. China is already building EVs en mass and some of them have, according to some people I met at least, better self-driving capability.

bilbo0s 1y ago

[flagged]

ausbah 1y ago
[flagged]
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cmontella 1y ago
    If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because... they're not confident it can actually self-drive.
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
      where did i say i wasn't supervising? Are you saying the self-summon is the unsupervised part? Cause i can flip that logic on it's head and say, if they weren't confident that it can summon to me, why would they implement the feature?
      - cmontella 1y ago
        The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is not sufficient for self driving, i.e. they're not doing it successfully.
        TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
        Waymo taxi's are always in geofenced areas with full HD maps down to the centimeter. I can't take it to tahoe like i can with my Tesla. my point is... my tesla drives itself... all the time and never have to disengage. People can shout technicalities all the time, and regulations where tesla fails because it "Doesn't have an operator that can take over" but for all intents and purposes, my car drives itself from my door to tahoe and back without me having to take over a single time. If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree.
        cmontella 1y ago
        > for all intents and purposes What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay attention. Which is the core function of self-driving, so not being able to do it is kind of whole thing. > If that's not full self driving, but waymo's geofenced, $45 for a ride down the street is, we just disagree. Geofenced or not, self driving is about not having to pay attention while the vehicle is in motion. If you have to supervise it, that's a very different thing from a system that will all you to looking at your phone or sleep. Tesla's approach of trying to drive everywhere instead of a geofenced area is part of why their system is failing to deliver self driving. Trying to do one thing well before expanding the performance envelope is good systems engineering practice. But Tesla has been widely testing their systems on the greater public, which has tragically resulted in deaths. This is why at the end of the day Tesla requires you to supervise their system while you operate it.
  - hengheng 1y ago
    So if it crashes, then it's Tesla's fault and they pay? Or do you pay?
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      Pretty sure what that commenter claims to be doing is illegal. At least in my state. And, he would be liable if that's what you're asking. Tesla, at no time, claimed that their vehicles should be used in that fashion.
      - tstrimple 1y ago
        All "full self driving" cars right now have "disengagements" where a human operator has to take over. https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-driving-tests-in-california-have-fewest-human-interventions-idUSKBN1FL3VX/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/waymos-self-drivi... > Disengagements occur when the self-driving system is deactivated with control handed back to humans because of a system failure or a traffic, weather or road situation that required human intervention. > Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements. > The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co, which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles. Notice that Tesla isn't even included. That's because they don't actually have full self driving tests ongoing like this. Just the half-assed version they beta test with their customers on public roads.
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
      If it crashes, it's my fault. At every point i'm supervising. Except in self summon, and if it side swipes the car on the way out, it's obviously still my fault. That's just never happened to me. Where in my sentence did i say I wasn't fully in control of the situation? I just say i very, very rarely even have to disengage in situations. On the very rare occassion that i do disengage, it's not really that the car is going to put me in a life threatening situation, it kinda just stops... and tweeks out a bit. Mainly at some super wierd triangle intersection in some of the small towns along the california coast. Honestly i've come to "feel" the car after using it. I'll disengage if i even have a shadow of a doubt it's not going to work, and in situations where i've seen it "fail" before. It might have accomplished it, but instead i just drive through the wierd intersection and reengage. This has already turned into a rant, but one last point; Have you driven in the other cars in Austin? They do the same thing. When it tweaks, or thinks it might tweak, they patch over to a human who takes control of the car.
  - danso 1y ago
    Are the Teslas in the Vegas Boring Loop still driven by humans? If so, how is it that Tesla seems unwilling to assume liability for what has to be one of the simplest driving tasks?
  - bumby 1y ago
    Just curious, but if it really was up to full self driving, why don't you think Tesla would have it certified as such? Being first to market as a true self driving vehicle would be a huge business win.
  - freejazz 1y ago
    I don't think it's fair to call a car self-driving if the self-driving disengages itself every time its about to get into a nasty wreck because of its own actions. It's facially "self-driving except for when it's not", the "not" times you, of course, cannot predict.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - standardUser 1y ago
    Tesla has never sold a single driverless taxi ride because it does not have sufficient self-driving technology. They're trying, they're just failing.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > Teslas are self driving on the roads everyday. Name one jursidiction where Teslas are allowed to operate on public roads without a human driver on the wheel. Because other people are doing that commercially, because they have demonstrated capacities that Tesla has not.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Well that is a goal post. They can do it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to or not. My friends tesla I’ve seen it in action. It goes on the highway. It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. It can even find a free parking spot in the lot and fully park the car. All while he does nothing at all with his hands on his lap. So yeah it totally can self drive.
      - warkdarrior 1y ago
        > It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. Waymo has been autonomously driving throughout San Francisco and its many hills for years.
ponow 1y ago
[flagged]
- roywiggins 1y ago
  Tesla also started without Musk.
  - ponow 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - MPSFounder 1y ago
      It speaks volumes tho that one of his clauses was to be treated as a co-founder. He clearly has a chip on his shoulder, and his technical abilities are to be questioned. Ultimately, people choose to believe Elon is smart or a good guy (saving the environment etc.). I think he is a remarkable conman. He was able to convince remarkable engineers to work on these products under the pretext of saving the environment, while paying relatively low wages (a few years ago Tesla pay was not comparable to other car manufacturers despite its California location). Also, I find it really funny that he was illegal in the US for a few months, and currently opposes immigration the way he does. Regarldess of your views on these matters, any man that takes a piece of the pie (subsidies, immigration etc.) and denies it to the next person is either a conman or a hypocrite, or both. I think he is a conman, who knows the next person will resort to tactics similar to his, and wants to avoid it. He never cared about the environment, given he is doing everything in his power to kill other EVs and maximize his own profits. There are many skeletons in the Musk and Thiel closets, enough to fill a graveyard. Hypocrisy is truly seen as a virtue in DC
- organsnyder 1y ago
  SpaceX depends _massively_ on government contracts.
- nxobject 1y ago
  As opposed to governments currently trying to lure Tesla in with subsidies, preferential tariff policy, etc.? (And, FWIW, an early source of revenue for Tesla _was_ subsidies. https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/tesla-motors-government-income/ https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/tesla-motors-gover...)

ponow 1y ago

It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success. I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop demonizing private accumulations of capital, "ending" billionaires and "monopolies" that are offering more things at lower cost. Small enterprises cannot afford a Bell Labs, a Watson Research, a Deep Mind, a Xerox PARC, etc.

regularization 1y ago
Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey. It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.
- absolutelastone 1y ago
  I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions. I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.
  - Frost1x 1y ago
    I wonder if it deals more with the approachability of software applications. If I even begin to think I’d compete with NVIDIA delivering similar hardware, I’d very quickly realize I was an idiot. Meanwhile as a single individual, there is still a reasonable amount of commercial markets of software I really do have some chance at tackling or competing against. As software complexity rises it’s becoming far less tractable than it was in say the 90s but there are still areas individuals and small sums of capital can enter. I think that makes the sector alluring in general. Hardware is just in general capital intensive, not even including all the intellectual capital needed. So it’s not that it’s uninteresting or even a commodity to me, it’s just a stone wall that whatever is there is there and that’s it in my mind.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

SpaceX was also partly funded by DARPA in its early years, without which, together with other DOD funding, it would likely not have survived.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

America the leader in the driverless car industry? Not entirely sure it is still true. At least might not be true much longer. China is already building EVs en mass and some of them have, according to some people I met at least, better self-driving capability.