i have the same experience 12.5 is insanely good. HN is full of people that dont want self driving to succeed for some reason. fortunately, it's clear as day to some of us that tesla approach will work
> HN is full of people that dont want self driving to succeed for some reason.
I would love for self-driving to succeed. I do long-ish car trips several times a year, and it would be wonderful if instead of driving, I could be watching a movie or working on something on my laptop.
I've tried Waymo a few times, and it feels like magic, and feels safe. Their record backs up that feeling. After everything I've seen and read and heard about Tesla, if I got into a Tesla with someone who uses FSD, I'd ask them to drive manually, and probably decline the ride entirely if they wouldn't honor my request.
> fortunately, it's clear as day to some of us that tesla approach will work
And based on my experience with Tesla FSD boosters, I expect you're basing that on feelings, not on any empirical evidence or actual understanding of the hardware or software.
I would love self-driving to succeed. I should be a Tesla fan, because I'm very much a fan of geekery and tech anywhere and everywhere.
But no. I want self-driving to succeed, and when it does (which I don't think is that soon, because the last 10% takes 90% of the time), I don't think Tesla or their approach will be the "winner".
It's evident to Tesla drivers using Full Self-Driving (FSD) that the technology is rapidly improving and will likely succeed. The key reason for this anticipated success is data: any reasonably intelligent observer recognizes that training exceptional deep neural networks requires vast amounts of data, and Tesla has accumulated more relevant data than any of its competitors. Tesla recently held a robotaxi event, explicitly informing investors of their plans to launch an autonomous competitor to Uber. While Elon Musk's timeline predictions and politics may be controversial, his ability to achieve results and attract top engineering and management talent is undeniable.
> It's evident to Tesla drivers using Full Self-Driving (FSD) that the technology is rapidly improving and will likely succeed
Sounds like Tesla drivers have been at the Kool-Aid then.
But to be a bit more serious, the problem isn't necessarily that people don't think it's improving (I do believe it is) or that they will likely succeed (I'm not sure where I stand on this). The problem is that every year Musk says the next year will be the Year of FSD. And every next year, it doesn't materialize. This is like the Boy Who Cried Wolf; Musk has zero credibility with me when it comes to predictions. And that loss of credibility affects my feeling as to whether he'll be successful at all.
On top of that, I'm not convinced that autonomous driving that only makes use of cameras will ever be reliably safer than human drivers.
I have consistently been critical of Musk for this over the many years it's been happening. Even right now, I don't believe FSD will be unsupervised next year like he just claimed. And yet, I can see the real progress and I am convinced that while it won't be next year, it could absolutely happen within two or three years.
One of these years, he is going to be right. And at that point, the fact that he was wrong for a long time won't diminish their achievement. As he likes to say, he specializes in transforming technology from "impossible" to "late".
> I'm not convinced that autonomous driving that only makes use of cameras will ever be reliably safer than human drivers.
Believing this means that you believe AIs will never match or surpass the human brain. Which I think is a much less common view today than it was a few years ago. Personally I think it is obviously wrong. And also I don't believe surpassing the human brain in every respect will be necessary to beat humans in driving safety. Unsupervised FSD will come before AGI.
Then why have we been just a year or two away from actual working self-driving, for the last 10 years? If I told my boss that my project would be done in a year, and then the following year said the same thing, and continued that for years, that’s not what “achieving results” means.
> and Tesla has accumulated more relevant data than any of its competitors.
Has it really? How much data is each car sending to Tesla HQ? Anybody actually know? That's a lot of cell phone bandwidth to pay for, and a lot of data to digest.
Vast amounts of data about routine driving is not all that useful, anyway. A "highlights reel" of interesting situations is probably more valuable for training. Waymo has shown some highlights reels like that, such as the one were someone in a powered wheelchair is chasing a duck in the middle of a residential street.
For most organizations data is a burden rather than a benefit. Tesla has never demonstrated that they can convert data to money, while that is the sole purpose of everything Google has built for decades.
The crux of the issue is that your interpretation of performance cannot be trusted. It is absolutely irrelevant.
Even a system that is 99% reliable will honestly feel very, very good to an individual operator, but would result in huge loss of life when scaled up.
Tesla can earn more trust be releasing the data necessary to evaluate the system’s performance. The fact that they do not is far more informative than a bunch of commentators saying “hey it’s better than it was last month!” for the last several years — even if it is true that it’s getting better and even if it’s true it’s hypothetically possible to get to the finish line.
It relies on inferred depth from a single point of view. This means that the depth/positioning info for the entire world is noisy.
From a safety critical point of view its also bollocks, because a single birdshit/smear/raindrop/oil can render the entire system inoperable. Does it degrade safely? does it fuck.
> recognizes that training exceptional deep neural networks requires vast amounts of data,
You missed good data. Recording generic driver's journeys isn't going to yield good data, especially if the people who are driving aren't very good. You need to have a bunch of decent drivers doing specific scenarios.
Moreover that data isn't easily generalisable to other sensor suites. Add another camera? yeahna, new model.
> Tesla recently held a robotaxi event, explicitly informing investors of their plans
When has Musk ever delivered on time?
> his ability to achieve results
most of those results aren't that great. Tesla isn't growing anymore, its reliant on state subsidies to be profitable. They still only ship 400k units a quarter, which is tiny compared to VW's 2.2million.
> attract top engineering and management talent is undeniable
Most of the decent computer vision people are not in tesla. Hardware wise, their factories aren't fun places to be. He's a dick to work for, capricious and vindictive.
Very strange not wanting poorly controlled 4,000lb steel cages driving around at 70mph stewarded by people calling “only had to stop it from killing me 4 times today!” as great success.
