[HN Gopher] It's a truck full of traffic lights [Tesla Autopilot]
___________________________________________________________________
It's a truck full of traffic lights [Tesla Autopilot]
Author : detaro
Score : 203 points
Date : 2021-06-03 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| samatman wrote:
| This is a great example of how Tesla's strategy to build out
| using real-life training data can pay off.
|
| Tesla now has data about what it looks like to drive behind a
| truck transporting traffic lights! No team in the world would
| solve this problem, in advance, in simulation.
|
| Not saying their strategy is going to work, not saying it's an
| unbeatable advantage, but: just look at it! This is a compelling
| demonstration.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| who isn't using that strategy? openpilot uses it.
| adflux wrote:
| A demonstration of why it will be a long time before it'll be
| rendered safe enough to drive on its own
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Clearly the probability of it happening is rather low unless you
| live close to the local municipality road maintenance depot.
|
| But it clearly means another edge case like detecting deer
| (wonder if they can handle our local Kudu) that they need to deal
| with.
|
| They might as well develop AGI at this rate.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Who could've ever predicted this scenario? A great example of
| something that's trivial for human beings to understand but where
| ML training sets will come up short.
| matt-attack wrote:
| That's what's frightening about this. I feel not enough people
| internalize just how primitive the car's
| understanding/perception of the world is. A two year old human
| brain would have no confusion in this scenario.
|
| We discount how much the concept of "understanding" is required
| in visual perception. We don't just see shapes we have a
| complete _understanding_ of what we're seeing.
|
| I might see a big rectangle flopping in the lane in front of
| me. I can _immediately_ ascertain whether it's a piece of
| tumbling plywood, or foam based on movement characteristics,
| color, apparently size, etc. I can then use that understanding
| to decide what evasive actions are required.
|
| A Tesla it seems has absolutely zero of this capability.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| One time, I fell asleep as a passenger in a car. I hit a
| bump, looked up, and screamed as I saw what looked like a car
| coming right for me.
|
| It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was just enough
| in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out of me.
|
| Humans have millions of years of evolution behind our visual
| processing systems. We have developed hacks that prevent our
| brain from getting tricked by unusual situations like traffic
| lights on trucks or backwards cars being towed. We only
| developed the first computers a hundred years ago, and only
| in the last 40 years have a small subset of people started
| learning about visual processing systems.
|
| It's easy to look at this video and scoff because of how
| trivial it seems. But it's instead a marvel of our minds that
| we can pick up on context clues so quickly and accurately
| that such oddities basically never puzzle us. Given the pace
| of our innovation, it wouldn't surprise me if our computer
| systems match ours within a few human generations at latest.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Given the pace of our innovation, it wouldn't surprise me
| if our computer systems match ours within a few human
| generations at latest.
|
| This is not a FLOPS problem. Moore's law can't save you
| here.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was just
| enough in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out of
| me._
|
| And you're sure that it was a bump, and not the driver
| pulling up rather close behind it and then giving a sharp
| tap of the brakes to wake you up? ;)
| belltaco wrote:
| >One time, I fell asleep in a car. I hit a bump, looked up,
| and screamed as I saw what looked like a car coming right
| for me. >It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was
| just enough in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out
| of me.
|
| There are some funny(?) youtube videos of people in the
| passenger seat waking up to this with tractor trailers
| being towed in reverse.
| hobofan wrote:
| I'm very curious how a LIDAR based system would have faired
| here. It very much looks like problem that would only appear
| with a limited vision-only system like Tesla has.
| [deleted]
| mortenjorck wrote:
| That the Autopilot world model is extrapolating these lights to
| follow the passing geography in ~500ms cycles, similar to how
| game netcode sends players running in their last known direction
| when encountering packet loss, is an interesting insight into how
| the system works.
| [deleted]
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| Very interesting. There must be some kind of assumption in models
| that traffic lights are stationary objects which results in them
| falling off the back of the truck.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I mean it makes sense. If you've never seen traffic lights be
| delivered to a new intersection you'd probably blithely assume
| you'll never encounter a stack of them that are unlit and
| moving.
|
| Somewhere at Tesla there's a junior engineer who's telling a
| senior engineer "I told you so!"
| [deleted]
| offsky wrote:
| If one of the lights in the back of that truck had illuminated
| red, would the car have put on the breaks in the middle of the
| road?
| darepublic wrote:
| My God, it's full of stars
| akomtu wrote:
| Using Tesla's "autopilot" isnt very different than working as an
| unpaid driving instructor to keep an eye on the "autopilot"
| trainee. To make things worse, the trainee is tripping on
| mushrooms and sees nonexistent cars appearing from nowhere, trees
| morphing into pedestrians and pedestrians morphing into traffic
| lights. The trainee also has a problem with epilepsy and youre
| expected to take control on a second notice. Edit: also, the
| trainee has cognitive ability of a mentally challenged frog.
| jsight wrote:
| That's basically true, but there's no reason to limit it to
| Autopilot. Although the high points of AP are better than any
| other system that I've tried so far. I've seen it do amazingly
| well in the rain at night, and in the rain on a road with faded
| markings that were hard to pick out. I've also seen it
| thoroughly confused by double-dashed lines at hov lanes.
|
| I'll still take that over the ones that beep proudly to tell
| you that they are about to fail to maintain their lane (hi
| ProPilot).
| notJim wrote:
| > I've seen it do amazingly well in the rain at night
|
| Not anymore, since they removed the radar. Rain seems to
| really interfere with the vision based system, and apparently
| auto high beams are required at night, and they flash
| constantly.
| bordercases wrote:
| Why did they remove radar?
| ffhhj wrote:
| To buy more bitcoins.
| timoth3y wrote:
| It's fascinating to watch this technology develop, but as a
| driver I usually feel more anxious using "autopilot" that not
| using it.
|
| With one _huge_ exception: self parallel-parking.
|
| I don't understand why this innovation doesn't get more love.
| Tesla's not the only manufacturer to offer this, of course, but
| this particular innovation has increased m enjoyment of city
| driving more than ... well, more than anything I can think of.
|
| Even if they never get anything else to work, it would have
| been worth it just for self parallel-parking. lol
|
| From an engineering perspective, of course there are serious
| problems that need attention, but sometimes it also good to
| celebrate the wins.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I actually don't want autopilot for the fast, freeway speed
| driving. That's easy. I want it for the mundane, exhausting
| stop-and-go, bumper to bumper traffic as we all slowly creep
| through the traffic.
| asdff wrote:
| There are already cruise control systems that do this for you
| [deleted]
| slg wrote:
| That's all Autopilot is, adaptive cruise control and lane
| keeping. Autopilot doesn't react to stoplights, stop signs,
| or basically anything else. That is a separate feature set
| that they misleadingly call Full Self Driving.
| cma wrote:
| I think it still doesn't read speed limit signs either
| like it used to be capable of, but some areas are
| programmed in.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| You can once again -
| https://electrek.co/2020/08/29/tesla-software-update-
| visuall...
|
| It was lost due to Tesla's decision to remove MobilEye as
| a supplier.
|
| Mobileye generally focuses on highly optimized HW/SW that
| does individual things very well, in a manner similar to
| how factory automation works (e.g., they basically built
| a "lane keeping + auto-braking + sign reading"
| appliance).
|
| Tesla decided that 1) It was bad to outsource automation
| 2) Starting from scratch and 'learning' how to drive
| using ML was better than iteratively teaching a car how
| to do discrete tasks very very well (this is why
| Autopilot regressed a bunch in 2016).
|
| In general, it's another symptom of Elon's 'I have an
| extremely specific idea, let's figure out' mentality that
| sometimes works and sometimes results in useless tunnels
| under Las Vegas.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| They don't typically work below 25 MPH, and definitely
| don't stop and go and keep you within the lane.
| mbell wrote:
| That was true of older systems, most newer adaptive
| cruise control systems I've used have no issue with stop
| and go traffic.
| sarajevo wrote:
| A Model 3 owner confirms this...
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I believe this one does all of those:
| https://www.toyota.com/safety-sense/animation/pcspd
| nethunters wrote:
| My Toyota Corolla with Toyota Safety Sense 2.0 (fitted in
| nearly every Toyota post 2018/2019) has stop and start,
| either press resume if you've stopped for more than 5
| seconds or tap the accelerator, and that's with lane
| tracing assist as well. I don't think there's a second I
| don't have both Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Tracing
| Assist activated.
|
| Edit: You can also accelerate without disabling it.
| belltaco wrote:
| I think only the new Honda L3 system(only on one very
| limited edition car in Japan) and a Subaru tech on some
| mainstream cars(in the US too) have this capability.
| jannyfer wrote:
| Just off the top of my head - Honda Sensing works in
| stop-and-go traffic and keeps you within the lane.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Honda Sense lane keeping is only for > 40mph. In
| addition, you need to press a button if the vehicle
| completely stops.
| ngokevin wrote:
| Subaru Eyesight goes down to zero and handles stop and go
| with lane centering. Though I guess provided you've
| started the adaptive cruise control system above the
| minimum speed.
| spockz wrote:
| Most cars support this here in Europe at least. However
| true traffic jam assist seems reserved for cars with
| automatic gears.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| My BMW 5 series does that. Huh. That's only when I ever
| use it.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| My mom's Subaru Forester does hands-off stop-and-go
| traffic from 0 to 90 mph. It has 2 cameras and does lane
| departure too. It will even activate antilock breaks if
| it needs to panic stop.
|
| Hyundais have exceptionally-good lane-following.
| codeulike wrote:
| My Kia EV does exactly this, and is fairly competent at
| it.
| runarberg wrote:
| May I ask, is traveling through a bumper to bumper traffic a
| frequent occurrence for you? If so, are there options for you
| to avoid it (e.g. change commuting times, work from home,
| walk, bike, or use public transportation)? If also yes, why
| do you tolerate it?
|
| Personally I see bumper to bumper traffic maybe 3 or 4 times
| a year (when driving home from a vacation or being forced to
| a doctor's appointment during rush hour). And I honestly
| don't get why anyone would subjugate them self to this kind
| of traffic as part of their daily commute.
| kbelder wrote:
| "Nobody drives that route at that time; it's too crowded."
| industriousthou wrote:
| Lot's of people have to be at particular places at
| particular times. Hence, the rush hour.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Consider yourself very lucky. Not everyone has the luxury
| of working from home, choosing their working hours or
| living close to public transit or within walking/biking
| distance from their job (in many areas, the farther you get
| away from city centers, the cheaper the real estate
| generally is).
|
| In the NYC area, bumper to bumper traffic is common. It can
| be caused by an accident or construction that blocks one or
| more lanes, cars merging on to an already congested
| highway, etc. These conditions frequently happen even
| outside of rush hour.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Try living in New York City, the whole tristate, not just
| Manhattan. 3 to 4 times a year is laughable. Try 30 to 40
| times a year if you take the Belt Parkway.
|
| I used to live in LA where Santa Monica Blvd was always
| backed up. I doubt LA traffic has gotten better either.
|
| I'm surprised by your insolence with regard to how shitty
| traffic circumstances are in big cities. Simply changing
| one's commuting times doesn't failsafe the issue.
| runarberg wrote:
| This question was specifically addressed to those that
| have the option of avoiding it and still don't. I was
| under the impression that there were several options of
| escaping bumper to bumper traffic on your daily commute
| in the New York City area.
|
| In fact I've often heard people from that area complain
| more often about lack of parking near their commuter rail
| station. Which indicates that people do rather tolerate
| circling the parking lot in their park-and-ride rather
| then risking stop-and-go traffic jams.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 30-40 times a year _if you own a car_ and drive it
| regularly. That 's why > 50% of households in NYC don't
| own a car.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Large parts of NYC (much of the outer boroughs) are not
| near the subway, and not within walking distance of a
| supermarket (especially if you're carrying groceries for
| an entire family). Millions of people live there because
| they can't afford Manhattan rents, especially for a
| family-sized apartment.
|
| Also, transit lines tend to connect well to mid-Manhattan
| but poorly between other locations. So if you live in
| Queens and work in Brooklyn, good luck getting to work
| reliably by public transportation. (Before you object to
| that arrangement, consider: If you own a house and have
| kids in school, you're not necessarily going to uproot
| your family and move just because your new job is further
| from home.)
|
| Thus, many ordinary New Yorkers rely on cars to commute
| to work.
| runarberg wrote:
| I did a quick google map survey and found that it can
| take about an hour to commute on public transit between a
| residential area in Queens and to a commercial area in
| Brooklyn[1]. Not ideal until you see that driving the
| same route takes about 40 min. So not a huge different
| and definitely passes as an alternative to avoid the risk
| of stop-and-go traffic jams.
|
| If you need to drive to the supermarket you should have
| the option of choosing a time and route with minimal risk
| of traffic jams. I find it hard to belief that many
| people are frequently hitting bumper to bumper traffics
| on their way to or from the supermarket. Occupationally
| yes, but frequently no.
|
| 1: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/84-25+168th+Pl,+Jamaic
| a,+NY+...
| ska wrote:
| > I honestly don't get why anyone would subjugate them self
| to this kind of traffic as part of their daily commute.
|
| You may have trouble understanding it, but empirically a
| huge number of people see this extremely regularly, if not
| daily.
|
| It's not even necessarily a feature of horrifically long
| commutes. For one example, lots of places that have
| basically ok traffic have bottlenecks at bridges, you may
| be stop and go for a little while every day getting across
| that.
| danw1979 wrote:
| The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the clip of
| autopilot hallucinating flying traffic lights was that it was
| clearly DUI and there's no way I'm getting in the car with that
| guy.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am fairly confident that the autonomous car business model is
| pretty dead. Electric cars - that's great ! But self driving is
| waaaay harder. And self driving has a inbuilt expectation of
| nearly perfect. It's not that if we swapped to self driving cars
| today we would halve car deaths (which would be something like
| 500k people pa - which would be a huge very important thing) but
| it would not be perceived as robots save 500k people a year, it
| would be instead "robots kill the other 500k per year"
|
| Liability, insurance, legal minefields and plain old marketing
| would never allow cars ,that perform as well as the best
| performing cars do today, to be on the roads in "every day"
| conditions.
|
| My conjecture is we end up building AV only roads. initially one
| lane of a highway, then ring roads round cities and major
| warehousing hubs, then across urban areas. Walled off in some way
| they simply become _railways with benefits_.
|
| At that point every business model ever written with Self Driving
| in the title goes in the bin.
|
| I am not saying the tech is useless - frankly it's fucking
| awesome that this is happening in my lifetime. But fucking
| awesome tech and workable business model aren't always the same
| thing.
|
| Not sure where I am going with the rant but I sure hope we get
| more out of the billions spent here than Teflon.
| propogandist wrote:
| you can skirt all regulation and set false expectations by
| simply calling your driver assist feature "autopilot"
| exporectomy wrote:
| It doesn't need to be almost perfect. Waymo, for instance has
| remote human assistance when it gets stuck, and even a human in
| a normal car drive to the scene and to get it unstuck if it's
| really bad. There could well be a point where those humans plus
| the tech are cheaper than a traditional full-time-per-customer
| human taxi driver.
|
| You might say people don't want those delays but we tolerate
| delays in normal commuting. An unattended bag on a tube station
| stopping trains, a car accident blocking traffic, traffic jams
| blocking traffic, mechanical breakdowns, etc. As long as
| they're infrequent enough, it should be OK for riders.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| You'll know self driving is almost here when it works in
| simulation at non-interactive framerates.
| separateform wrote:
| Railways with benefits aren't good enough and would be an even
| worse business model.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Au contraire, seems we're mostly there. It's incredible having
| watched self-driving, and neural networks, go from new concepts
| and barely functioning to "order here" and public use (tell me
| the numerous YouTube FSD videos aren't what they are). Insofar
| as there are still serious edge cases to address, they're being
| solved.
|
| Time and again I've watched "ain't happening" technology become
| the preferred norm practically overnight. Eagerly awaiting my
| FSD CT, and making long trips without having to micro-manage
| every foot across thousands of miles.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Nope. You're just not patient enough. ACs will come, but very
| gradually. They're already (mostly) here but it will take
| another decade or two to be completely A.
| treeman79 wrote:
| So between "not invented" and "not proven impossible yet".
|
| https://xkcd.com/678/
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Lol, I guess. ACs aren't the same as the Moller Skycar.
| It's a very, very complicated "DARPA Grand Challenge" where
| the goal is to not get sued by Ralph Nader into oblivion
| because the algorithm went MCAS and killed grandma. Waymo
| or someone will need to do racing and the Gumball 3000
| first before people will accept anything more than semi-A
| (glorified cruise control and lane following).
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Doesn't "I'm fairly confident" kind of imply you're not
| actually confident?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| It's common British English idiom.
| ajross wrote:
| I see this rather differently. In fact AI is already as good as
| human drivers, statistically. Only a few years back, we could
| point at people getting killed by software bugs like the Tesla
| path-under-semi-trailer issue (not a lot, but it did happen and
| they were real bugs).
|
| That's not happening any more. All we have left is laughing at
| stuff like this, where the visualization (not even the
| autopilot!) gets confused by seeing real (!) traffic lights on
| a truck, so it paints them in space, but then has to re-
| recognize them because they are moving.
|
| At some point, the luddites will just run out of ammunition.
| It's sort of happening already.
| akersten wrote:
| > where the visualization (not even the autopilot!) gets
| confused by seeing real (!) traffic lights on a truck, so it
| paints them in space, but then has to re-recognize them
| because they are moving.
|
| Just my hypothesis: but I think the autopilot _really did_
| see them as traffic lights, and just got lucky that they
| weren 't powered and ignored them as out of order. Were there
| a cross street, I suspect the car would have stopped and
| treated it as an uncontrolled intersection...
| lstamour wrote:
| > AI is already as good as human drivers
|
| But the AI drives slowly and gets confused easily. Regular
| drivers routinely have to go around self-driving cars. Not to
| say they won't improve, but it seems like current AI is
| assistive to the point where it might be harmful when drivers
| rely on it in speeds and situations where they shouldn't. I'm
| sure it will keep improving, but I feel like this is one of
| those situations where the amount of data and training
| required, and the amount of iteration on the software
| required to handle edge cases is not impossible but is
| exceptionally difficult.
| cvak wrote:
| Do you have source for the statistics? I remember reading
| somewhere that it was just a number one of the AI projects
| said, with no verification, also with no knowledge of the
| setup.
| lvs wrote:
| I think the issue is bigger than just self-driving. AI/ML is
| wildly oversold as an engineering solution to real world
| problems. In the best case, it's solving easy problems under
| narrowly defined conditions. It's not really solving hard
| problems robustly under real conditions.
| ajross wrote:
| This genre of posts is so tiresome.
|
| As the second video in the thread demonstrates, the truck is
| _literally hauling traffic lights_. The AI recognition is
| correct, the only thing worth complaining about is that they 're
| displayed as static objects for the user after recognition, just
| to be re-recognized a few seconds later in a different place.
| Note that the car is correctly not detecting they are lit, so not
| inferring direction (though AP isn't engaged, so I guess we'll
| never know what it would have done).
|
| No doubt you could play the same game by putting a traffic cone
| on your bike. The car wants to see important traffic objects,
| it's literally what it's trained for.
| theamk wrote:
| And that illustrates the important problem with self-driving
| car: if you want L5 autonomy, you need to be handle all the
| weird cases.
| sfblah wrote:
| I recently test drove a Tesla just to see how the autopilot
| system works. The way they handle traffic lights is pretty
| entertaining. It seems them, particularly yellow lights, in a lot
| of situations that are truly perplexing. It also had a tendency
| to turn trees into traffic cones and to be truly impressive at
| detecting garbage cans. On some level it's hard to understand
| exactly what they're trying to do there.
|
| I also remember being at an intersection where I was turning left
| and was waiting behind another car. The display repeatedly showed
| cars the cars crossing in front of us crashing into the car in
| front of me. Not sure why.
| cs702 wrote:
| Well, of course. This is probably the first time the car has come
| across a truck carrying multiple street lights, without cover,
| stacked on the back of the truck, well above eye level. It's a
| rather unusual edge case.
|
| It's only a matter of _time_ before the software in these cars
| can handle the vast majority of edge cases as well as or better
| than human beings. Human vision isn 't exactly reliable.[a]
|
| In the meantime, someone should make a playable game in which
| trucks throw street lights at cars. Maybe someone at Tesla is
| willing to make this game in good jest?
|
| [a] See, for example
| http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Did they get to level 17? I hear you get an extra car.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| As an ML engineer I'm a little bit baffled that Tesla has not
| solved this by now. It's not like they lack data or ML knowledge.
|
| It seems like they should have a million hard test cases that
| must pass in simulation before releasing a new model. The
| simulations should be harder and more extreme than anything
| encountered in real life.
|
| I think the real problem is obvious. They're trying to rush the
| work because Elon said so.
| fsh wrote:
| I've never understood this argument. Isn't the main bottleneck
| that you need well-labeled data for training the neural
| networks? How is having tons and tons of random camera footage
| going to help?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| For a lot of problems, clean data labeled data is no longer
| the bottle neck, or in some cases, there are ways around it.
| The bigger issue is dealing with the "long-tail" of unknown
| new scenarios. This is a currently unsolved challenge.
| unoti wrote:
| > How is having tons and tons of random camera footage going
| to help?
|
| One way to think of this is that that the footage is
| implicitly labelled: we have the benefit of hindsight: we
| know what the state/location of the vehicle was going into
| the future. That benefit of hindsight also can serve as
| implicit labels by knowledge that the vehicle did not crash
| or collide with something immediately after the footage.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Fairly simple, they have footage from every time a person had
| to correct AP's driving. Take that footage label it. Train
| some of it, save some for test cases. Finally don't release
| an update until it drives better than the current system.
| Havoc wrote:
| > they should have a million hard test cases that must pass
|
| Move fast and break things [like tests]
| ModernMech wrote:
| Right? This should be trivially solved with some sort of
| temporal filtering on detected objects. If you detect a traffic
| light at (x,y) in one frame, and it disappears in the next, but
| there's a new one at (x+dx,y+dy), then you shouldn't place a
| new one down in the world frame. You should only place a
| traffic light down if you're confident it exists and is
| operational. At the very least, the lights should be detected
| on the back of the truck, but they should move _with_ the
| truck. At least that matches what 's happening.
|
| I don't understand why this is hard for Tesla engineers -- I
| was doing this kind of thing in grad school a decade+ ago and
| it worked fine. I've seen it in other demos where object
| classifications rapidly cycle between person, bike, car, etc.
| Are they not filtering anything? Is this a symptom of "AI-ing
| all the things"? Because we did it with bog standard computer
| vision techniques back then and never got behaviors like this.
| nmca wrote:
| Did any of your grad school work make it into the real world
| at all? Typically I'd suggest that such ideas are simple in
| theory and difficult in practice.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yes, there are real systems out there working off of the
| techniques we used back then. I didn't work much in theory
| at all.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Years ago, a friend worked in the Autopilot group. It took them
| _a year_ to procure servers to store the telemetry of the
| existing cars, and then weeks to have them setup.
|
| They don't work there anymore.
|
| From their experience, I know one thing: I will never work for
| Elon Musk. He may be a great visionary and salesman, but he's a
| _horrible_ manager.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| This is fascinating, but what caused the delays specifically?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Server procurement was a CFO thing, and their specific
| requirements didn't fit under the existing buckets, so it
| took them a long time to get it approved.
|
| It was stunning to see the complete disconnect between
| Musk's grand declarations and what the organization was
| actually setup to deliver.
|
| Frankly, it just gives me more respect for Tim Cook, who as
| COO at Apple made his company able to turnaround and
| deliver HW in record time.
|
| Edit: in retrospect I wonder if Musk's grand public
| declarations were actually a way to control and pressure
| his own organization. Remember, Musk didn't actually found
| Tesla, he rescued it from bankruptcy after the Roadster
| didn't return as much as needed, so he inherited an
| existing structure.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Just like your anecdote, I have one to share as well: I know
| a close friend that works on space lasers at SpaceX and has a
| blast, best job ever according to him and he thinks Elon is
| _an excellent_ manager mostly because there is zero
| bureaucracy and people are not afraid of "Do nothing" option
| as well as removing complexity. In fact, he wouldn't work
| anywhere else after seeing the company culture.
|
| I know it's cool to hate Elon.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I dunno, "move fast and break things" works for rockets
| [1], not so much for cars.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I don't think Elon has a day-to-day role at SpaceX unlike
| at Tesla, right? From what I've read, Gwynne Shotwell is
| the main person in charge there.
| simondotau wrote:
| Elon spends nearly as much time at SpaceX as he does
| Tesla. There's no question that Elon regularly mucks in
| at the lowest levels of engineering at SpaceX.
|
| If you want evidence from a reasonably neutral observer,
| take Sandy Munro (himself an engineer who has worked on
| everything from cars to aeroplanes). He recently
| interviewed Elon, ostensibly about Tesla but the
| interview was in a meeting room at SpaceX. After the
| interview he was invited to a two hour design review
| meeting and was "blown away" at Elon's depth of
| involvement.
|
| https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 (6:10 to 8:45)
| Geee wrote:
| He is very much involved at actual day-to-day engineering
| at SpaceX. He is the CEO and the chief engineer there.
|
| Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k
| 1e0ta/eviden...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1nc_chrNQk&t=377s
| kempbellt wrote:
| I'm curious what the issue is here that seems unsolved? It's
| unconventionally displaying what it is recognizing, but the car
| isn't doing anything janky.
|
| The car is properly recognizing traffic lights pretty darned
| well, considering the circumstance. It looks like it has a
| built in understanding that traffic lights are "always"
| stationary - hence, assigning them static locations on the 3D
| map - but it keeps having to update the model because the
| lights are actually moving.
|
| This seems like a very non-obvious edge case that I wouldn't
| expect an ML team to even consider as a possibility. Now they
| need to program into the ML model an understanding that traffic
| lights are _typically_ stationary. Which seems even more
| difficult to me, from a technical perspective - you don 't want
| false negatives...
|
| The car isn't braking or making any strange maneuvers from what
| I can tell. I'm actually impressed that it's handling it this
| well.
| simondotau wrote:
| I'd go further and predict that the stationary traffic lights
| are just an artefact of the visualisation and not the vision
| system itself.
| [deleted]
| sabhiram wrote:
| So you are impressed that they ran headfirst into a bunch of
| traffic lights because they did not know what to do?
|
| When you don't know what to do - do nothing. What if it was a
| traffic light on roller skates? Or a kid, dressed as a
| traffic light, on roller skates?
| tshaddox wrote:
| They're unlit traffic lights. Would you rather the car slam
| on the brakes?
|
| But seriously, I'm inclined to be charitable here and
| assume that this is merely a quirk of the UI display.
| There's no evidence that the autopilot did anything unsafe
| (apparently it wasn't even engaged?), and until I see
| evidence of that I'm willing to withhold judgment. (I have
| seen evidence of other situations where Tesla autopilot did
| unsafe things and I'm in no way apologetic about those
| situations.)
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I just figured out how I can make sure self-driving cars
| stop for me when I'm trying to cross a street. Dress up as
| a red light.
| kbelder wrote:
| Or wear one of these t-shirts: https://www.spreadshirt.co
| m/shop/design/stop+sign+mens+premi...
| comradesmith wrote:
| Stopping would be a form of action too. -\\_tsu_/-
| kempbellt wrote:
| I don't know exactly how Tesla's safety systems are
| designed, but this is my guess.
|
| Collision detection systems (radar) are accurately _not_
| detecting an impending collision because the lights are not
| actually on a collision course with the vehicle.
|
| Object recognition systems (computer vision) are working
| very well, because they recognize the lights and are
| updating the 3D map accordingly, but the traffic light 3D
| model is not designed to be a moving object - unlike
| vehicles, which frequently move. Which is why we see the
| car "passing through" them.
|
| What we are likely seeing is simply a weird edge case in
| the output for the user-interface. I'd imagine if an object
| was actually flying at the car and the car could see it, it
| would brake accordingly.
|
| Also, the map is two-dimensional. The car frequently drives
| _underneath_ traffic lights that I 'm sure also appear "on
| top of" the car in normal cases.
|
| Object recognition and collision detection, from what I
| understand, are two very different systems.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Tesla is not using any radar/lidar systems for
| FSD/autopilot (anymore), it's all visual. It might be
| that there are completely different systems for
| recognizing obstacles and what is shown on the map, but
| this still raises the question why and why one of those
| systems seem to act like this.
| [deleted]
| codeulike wrote:
| The car is not under autopilot. The driver is driving. (the
| grey steering wheel icon would be blue if autopilot was on)
| lvs wrote:
| Working-as-intended certainly isn't an argument I was
| expecting to see in this thread.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It's a feature, not a bug!
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I think the real problem is obvious._
|
| Yes. The human brain and visual systems aren't nearly so
| trivial to replicate as a lot of people in the tech industry
| seem to think.
|
| Tesla is just one of many case studies in the paired tech
| industry arrogance seen so frequently:
|
| - "A human is just a couple really crappy cameras and a neural
| network, we know how to do better cameras and neural networks,
| how hard can it be?"
|
| - "We can do anything we dream with 99.995% reliability in the
| synthetic, computer-based world of the internet because we know
| code. Therefore, we can do anything we want in the physical
| reality with code!"
|
| Both are far from evident in practice, but the belief in them
| continues, despite it being increasingly obvious to everyone
| else that neither one is true.
|
| Human vision and world processing is quite impressive - and, as
| pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a two or three year old
| would have no trouble working out that the obstacles were some
| things on a truck. I've got a nearly three year old, and I
| guarantee he wouldn't confuse those for stoplights in the
| slightest. I also wouldn't let him out on the road, though he
| does well enough with a little Power Wheels type toy. But there
| is _far_ more going on in the visual processing system than we
| even understand yet, much less have the slightest clue how to
| replicate.
|
| And while code may be fine on the internet (where you can retry
| failed API calls and things mostly make sense), the quote about
| how fiction is constrained by what's believable and reality
| sees no such restrictions is very true. Out on the roads, all
| sorts of absolutely insane things can and do happen on a
| regular basis - and you can't predict or plan for all of them.
| But the car has to handle them or it crashes.
|
| As a random example, a year or two ago, I was behind a car that
| had poorly strapped a chunk of plywood to their roofrack with a
| good chunk hanging forward, and the front end of it was
| starting to oscillate awfully hard. I had a good clue that it
| was going to come apart sometime in the very near future, so
| backed off from a normal following distance to quite a way
| back. Sure enough, half a mile later, it failed, went flying
| through the air, slammed into the road a good distance behind
| the car, and tumbled a bit. Had I been using a normal in town
| following distance, it would have either hit me or tumbled into
| me, but using a human visual system, it was obvious that my
| existing following distance stood a good chance of being a bad
| idea.
|
| Stuff like this happens on roads _constantly._ Meanwhile, state
| of the art self driving can 't tell the difference between
| stoplights and some poles on a truck. You'll excuse me if I
| don't think the problem is anywhere remotely close to solved
| for a general case Level 4 purpose.
| ve55 wrote:
| Personally I view the problem here not as a failure of object
| recognition or what would be considered a visual system, but
| of abstract reasoning (or lack thereof, of course)
|
| Aritical neural networks are pretty good at object
| recognition, among hundreds of other things, and even better
| than humans at some of them. They are, however, generally
| pretty bad at abstract reasoning, critical thinking,
| 'understanding' concepts in-depth, and so on, and I think
| that's a more constructive way to phrase the problem we see
| in this video.
|
| When a problem is fully redicible to a simple vision problem,
| modern neural networks are a great choice, but being a good
| driver involves much more than just the visual cortex.
| simondotau wrote:
| The problem, to the extent there is one, is certainly with
| the visualisation; it's not so clear if there's any problem
| with the underlying vision system.
| blhack wrote:
| Is the car trying to stop? The visualization here is for
| autopilot (which ignores traffic lights), so even if the truck
| driver was trying to do something malicious, the car would ignore
| it.
| codeulike wrote:
| The car is not under autopilot, the driver is driving. The car
| is just displaying what it thinks it can see.
|
| (the grey steering wheel icon means autopilot is not engaged,
| it would be blue if it was on)
| schmorptron wrote:
| I don't think autopilot is actually enabled in this clip, the
| steering wheel icon is greyed out.
| detaro wrote:
| At least in the clip it's accelerating, so it doesn't seem to
| take them into account - which would make sense for non-lit
| traffic lights anyways?
| nucleardog wrote:
| I'd wager the average case of a non-lit traffic light is more
| likely to be a traffic light that's... out (at least around
| here newly installed ones are covered until they're
| activated) so no, I wouldn't say ignoring them would make
| sense.
|
| It would generally be a clue that there's an intersection
| busy enough to require signals that now lacks signals or
| signage which would warrant extra caution. I'd expect the car
| to at least slow down significantly, if not come to a
| complete stop before proceeding.
| a3n wrote:
| That is effing hilarious.
|
| Except we're trusting ML to perform surgery, choose conviction
| sentencing, evaluate job CVs, determine acceptable marriage
| partners (why not?), determine who can have kids (why not?),
| determine who gets into college (why not?), determine who gets a
| loan (why not?), determine who gets to work on ML (why not?). And
| drive cars.
| david_allison wrote:
| Not if the GDPR has anything to say about it
|
| > The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a
| decision based solely on automated processing, including
| profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her
| or similarly significantly affects him or her.
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
| codeulike wrote:
| In this video, I dont think the car is actually in autopilot. Its
| just displaying what it thinks it can see, while the driver
| drives.
|
| (the steering wheel icon at the top of the screen is grey, not
| blue)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hopefully, an image of this truck never shows up in a captcha
| challenge.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Tesla clearly needs to hire a "Red Team" to find weaknesses of
| their autopilot (and other systems).
|
| The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self driving
| is statistically safer than most drivers. Clearly there is a ton
| of room for improvement in both AI and Humans.
| bigdict wrote:
| > Red Team
|
| I'm sorry, did you mean customers?
| falcolas wrote:
| He didn't. Telsa did.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Why hire a team to beta test your AI self driving car when you
| have customers willing to shell out $10k for the privilege?
| darepublic wrote:
| > even a randomly stupid AI ... Is statistically safer than
| most drivers
|
| the fact that people still trot this out every Tesla thread is
| super annoying. Sorry to break it to you but this is a 100%
| false claim
| Closi wrote:
| > The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self
| driving is statistically safer than most drivers.
|
| This hasn't been shown yet at all. Statistics showing autopilot
| have less crashes per mile always ignore that Autopilot is
| doing the type of driving that has the least accidents per mile
| (motorway driving).
| mikewarot wrote:
| I was wrong, it's almost as safe, not safer.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self
| driving is statistically safer than most drivers._
|
| A strong claim, lacking actual evidence for it. All we have to
| go on are some Elon tweets (rather the definition of a biased
| source) and the actual crash rate. Without a _lot_ more data
| (which Tesla steadfastly refuses to release) about
| environments, corrections, etc, it 's quite impossible to make
| that sort of statement with any confidence.
|
| The Tesla hardware is a weird combination of capable and
| insanely dumb, and it's far from obvious which it will be in
| any given situation until it's gone through it.
|
| If an honest statistical analysis of the data indicated that
| Tesla's automation was better than human drivers (or better
| than other driver assist systems), I would fully expect them to
| have released the values. Since they haven't, and only hint at
| it and make statements that _sound_ statistical but really aren
| 't, I assume they've done the numbers internally and know it's
| not nearly as good as they like to imply.
|
| If I drove in a city like their "self driving" beta was a few
| months back, I would be hauled from the car on suspicions of
| driving while hammered.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self
| driving is statistically safer than most drivers. Under sunny
| highway conditions? Perhaps. In a night snowstorm? Probably yes
| - because the AI would be at the side of the road waiting for
| the human to drive.
|
| I think self driving is a typical 80/20 problem. We won't have
| "full" self driving because the costs are exponential for each
| step closer to it. But driving on 80% of roads on 80% of days,
| with supervision? That could happen.
|
| But that said: we won't accept AI that just makes traffic safer
| "on average". I'm fine with human shortcomings causing
| accidents. People will not accept car manufacturers cutting
| corners and causing accidents, even if statistically it's
| safer. So the very high bar for self driving isn't just "as
| safe as humans".
| nullc wrote:
| I saw a good recent youtube video showing numerous concerning FSD
| failures in urban driving:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs
| dawkins wrote:
| I saw the video and it is crazy that they think it is even
| close to production.
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