[HN Gopher] Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Auton...
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       Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles
       [video]
        
       Author : vpj
       Score  : 96 points
       Date   : 2021-06-21 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | childintime wrote:
       | The video: https://youtu.be/NSDTZQdo6H8
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Thanks! Maybe it's best if we change the URL to that from
         | https://twitter.com/vpj/status/1407000737423368197.
        
           | ejdyksen wrote:
           | That video is a screen capture from another video (which was
           | screen capped from a livestream), but the original has much
           | better audio quality.
           | 
           | Here's a direct link:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOL_rCK59ZI&t=28293s
        
       | Robotbeat wrote:
       | He made a very good argument for vision-only, but it seems like
       | training actually uses radar data to help calibrate vision
       | measurements, so it seems to me there's value in making some
       | vehicles still contain radar (say, one out of 10) even if it's
       | not used for controlling the vehicle directly at drive time.
       | 
       | Also, the sensor resolution issue he mentioned could be addressed
       | by using a higher resolution radar sensor.
       | 
       | I find the list of 221 triggers to be interesting. In principle,
       | the NHTSA or NTSB could help contribute lists of triggers to
       | companies to validate their training sets on.
       | 
       | Every time there is a fatal airliner accident, the NTSB does a
       | safety investigation and airliners get a little bit safer each
       | time. In the same way, each fatal accident in a vehicle with this
       | kind of autonomy could end up being captured by these triggers,
       | improving safety over time in a sort of mixture between expert
       | human analysis and ML.
       | 
       | (Nobody does this for all regular car crashes because fatal car
       | crashes happen every day! And you're not going to retrain human
       | drivers about some new edge case every day, although you can for
       | vehicles like this.)
        
         | avs733 wrote:
         | Most fatal car crashes are investigated, but by the police not
         | engineering experts. The invetigational motivation is legal and
         | liability focused not improvement focused.
         | 
         | You sparked a happy delusion in my mind...training drivers to
         | the same level we train pilots. Can you imagine drivers having
         | regular check rides?
        
           | eddanger wrote:
           | I would love to see re-certification of "professional"
           | drivers. Almost daily I encounter taxi or semi-truck
           | operators driving at the limit of what is acceptable.
        
         | osipov wrote:
         | > so it seems to me there's value in making some vehicles still
         | contain radar (say, one out of 10) even if it's not used for
         | controlling the vehicle directly at drive time.
         | 
         | That's not how neural networks work. You start by training them
         | with a radar, then you deploy them without the radar. Neural
         | nets make the radar irrelevant post-training. This is the
         | entire point of Karpathy's pitch.
        
       | andyxor wrote:
       | I like Andrej from his PhD research days and awesome blog posts
       | but this is a series of disasters in the making, that is until
       | FTC steps in after more people die from "self-driving" accidents
       | under interesting and unexpected circumstances.
       | 
       | The whole vision vs. LIDAR stuff is a distraction as long as
       | Tesla "AI" doesn't have common sense.
       | 
       | It literally doesn't know what it's doing, and the tail of "edge
       | cases" is infinitely long.
       | 
       | It would be more honest to show the cases where it missed,
       | thankfully there is no lack of them in "FSD beta" videos on
       | YouTube.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
         | >common sense
         | 
         | What a ridiculously useless term.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | gameswithgo wrote:
           | a better phrase might be "ability to do higher order
           | reasoning to decide what to do in a novel situation"
        
           | andyxor wrote:
           | exactly, who needs common sense when you can sell the bright
           | vision of self-driving future.
        
           | Fricken wrote:
           | Try using common sense to figure out what he meant by that.
        
         | option wrote:
         | There are two fundamental reasons, in principle, vision alone
         | can do it: 1) Humans do it with vision alone 2) You can
         | actually predict lidar's output with vision alone. So many
         | systems out there actually use lidar to generate more labeled
         | data to make lidar unnecessary
        
           | kaba0 wrote:
           | In principle. But we do have 3 billion neurons for that with
           | ridiculous number of interconnections - even if an order of
           | magnitude less connection would be enough, we are still far
           | away from that amount of computations. And that is actually
           | the easy part of the problem - mapping an image to a depth
           | map. The hard part is interpreting it for which we have a
           | complete inner universe built up, with context-dependent
           | logic. FSD is simply a really hard problem that we are not
           | even getting close to. We are at a fancy robot vacuum level.
        
           | andyxor wrote:
           | besides vision, humans also have this thing called brain, and
           | reasoning, and instincts, and being able to tell if the
           | object in front of them is e.g. a roof of an overturned truck
           | vs. empty space, etc, etc.
           | 
           | the key word is "etc" which expands into infinite tail, which
           | no big data training on farms of GPUs would ever help with.
           | 
           | Humans and other animals have an ability to understand the
           | scene and generalize from prior experiences to infinite set
           | of new and unexpected circumstances, the "common sense" these
           | dumb curve-fitting models are fundamentally lacking.
        
             | darknavi wrote:
             | > humans also have this thing called brain, and reasoning,
             | and instincts, and being able to tell if the object in
             | front of them is e.g. a roof of an overturned truck vs.
             | empty space, etc, etc.
             | 
             | Assuming the car is reasonably good at this, it has the
             | advantage that it can see in every direction at once.
             | 
             | I don't think self-driving cars will ever be perfect, but I
             | think they will quickly become less-lethal than the average
             | human.
        
               | kaba0 wrote:
               | For the average case, perhaps. But we are not doing too
               | badly for the average case either.
               | 
               | Let's see how well does a Tesla react to exceptional
               | cases where actual decision making is required, few data
               | sample is available, etc. Statistics can be misleading
               | with rare events.
        
           | semi-extrinsic wrote:
           | There are many things humans do with vision alone that
           | machines can't. For instance see if a person standing 50 ft
           | away is looking at you or at the house behind you.
           | 
           | The human vision system operates at a bitrate equivalent of
           | well beyond 500 gigabits per second. Resorting to "humans can
           | do it with vision alone" is only a sufficient argument if
           | your computer vision system can match that.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | bluepanda928752 wrote:
           | With what kind of reliability can LIDAR data be predicted
           | with vision nowadays?
        
       | bluepanda928752 wrote:
       | Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e.
       | having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can
       | collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the
       | last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general
       | artificial intelligence
       | 
       | Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto
       | manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when
       | Tesla L5 FSD is finally available and when humanity is destroyed
       | by the general AI it runs on will be very awesome and also very
       | short
        
         | SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
         | They're betting that they can use a massive feedback loop to
         | train a set of neural networks to the point where they are as
         | accurate as LiDAR without actually firing any lasers.
         | 
         | Even if you believe this goal is possible to achieve at some
         | point in the future, I think the argument falls apart when you
         | consider that it will take years, probably decades, for a pure
         | vision approach to catch up to where Waymo is _today_ in terms
         | of safety. (They have cameras too.)
         | 
         | That Tesla can't afford to fit expensive LiDAR sensors to all
         | of the cars it sells is Tesla's problem. Regulators won't give
         | a shit that pure vision is "better" in theory. They will simply
         | compare Tesla's crash rate in autonomous mode with that of
         | Waymo and other AV operators, and act accordingly.
        
           | bluepanda928752 wrote:
           | I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the
           | LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer
           | car
           | 
           | However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth
           | estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level
           | AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming
           | cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla
           | can't really change their stance on this without admitting
           | that FSD options they already sold would not actually become
           | FSD within the lifetimes of these vehicles. I suspect this
           | might also be the reason why Karpathy looks more and more
           | nervous with each new talk
        
           | practice9 wrote:
           | > I think the argument falls apart when you consider that it
           | will take years, probably decades, for a pure vision approach
           | to catch up to where Waymo is today in terms of safety. (They
           | have cameras too.)
           | 
           | On what set of metrics do you think Waymo is safer? IMO it's
           | too early to compare and cherry-picked proofs both from Waymo
           | and Tesla are not really representative.
        
           | DSingularity wrote:
           | Definitely. Especially with car companies like NIO strapping
           | in LIDAR to their upcoming models.
        
         | ra7 wrote:
         | > Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto
         | manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy.
         | 
         | Tesla is also the only company to claim to target L5 autonomy.
         | Everyone else, including Waymo, is strictly targeting L4 and
         | say L5 autonomy is not possible or realistic. L5 is a pipe
         | dream.
        
       | nickik wrote:
       | I resonantly had an argument on here where somebody insistent
       | that breaking because of over-passes were issues with vision
       | system. Seem pretty clear that it is the resolution of the radar,
       | not the shadow of the bridge that causes the issue. Good to get
       | some more insight into this.
       | 
       | This is the right thing to focus on, as it is by far the largest
       | issue with Autopilot on the highway. Multiple people who do
       | testing of these system that false positives on some highway
       | overpasses are the biggest usability issue.
        
       | nightski wrote:
       | It's interesting that an academic conference now feels like a
       | marketing op for industrial research labs more than anything. His
       | claims about how accurate their vision system is and how it is
       | exceeding other sensors is not verifiable in any way to the
       | public. Given how well qualified he is I am sure he is not wrong!
       | Andrej is brilliant. But this is an academic conference right?
       | This isn't open science, it's a discussion about an engineered
       | system. I'm afraid this is the future of ML research (which CV is
       | so heavily dependent on now). Long gone are the days of reading a
       | paper and understanding the approach. Now you need the data and
       | model which may not even be computationally feasible without
       | millions of dollars in hardware. This isn't Tesla's fault or
       | anything, it just makes me sad.
        
         | aeternum wrote:
         | In the talk, he gave clear examples with detailed position +
         | velocity graphs where the vision system detected obstacles
         | sooner and with less jitter than the radar system. Specifically
         | the overpass where radar triggers erroneous braking, and the
         | pulled over truck where radar detects the obstacle
         | significantly slower.
        
           | stefan_ wrote:
           | That's a strawman. No one is looking to build FSD with radar
           | sensors that have shipped on cars for 20 years now for things
           | like adaptive cruise control. LIDAR is what vision only is
           | compared to.
        
         | ketamine__ wrote:
         | I've read claims that they are desperately trying to hire.
         | 
         | https://mobile.twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/140705191831739...
        
           | DSingularity wrote:
           | Maybe it's an unfortunate side effect of their success.
           | Almost all early members of the team are now multi
           | millionaires if they held their stock.
        
           | jowday wrote:
           | Anecdata but both of the people I know that worked on
           | Autopilot quit within 18 months of starting, citing extreme
           | overwork and Musk micromanaging things. This lines up with
           | that.
        
           | karpathy wrote:
           | For the record these are some blatant & false FUD attempts.
        
       | sam_goody wrote:
       | tldr: Tesla uses vision alone, and has dropped radar and the
       | other sensor. He makes a very decent argument why.
       | 
       | (Surprisingly, he basically ignores night driving.)
        
         | nickik wrote:
         | The list of triggers contains things like 'motorcycles at
         | night', so it seems its all in that dataset.
        
         | dogma1138 wrote:
         | Ironically this is what Tesla criticized Mobileye for.
         | 
         | I still think that this is far the best demonstration of
         | autonomous driving to date https://youtu.be/A1qNdHPyHu4
        
           | marricks wrote:
           | Wow that demo has it all.
           | 
           | - car stalled in it's lane - complicated intersections -
           | people exiting cars in it's lane - car going over into it's
           | lane
           | 
           | If I had an hour of driving that I'd be stressed.
        
             | halotrope wrote:
             | Wait until you see the Jerusalem 40 minute video. Munich
             | traffic is tame in comparison: https://youtu.be/kJD5R_yQ9aw
             | I really don't understand why mobileye gets so little
             | recognition. They might be quietly winning the self driving
             | race.
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-21 23:00 UTC)