[HN Gopher] The Waymo World Model
___________________________________________________________________
The Waymo World Model
Author : xnx
Score : 589 points
Date : 2026-02-06 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| xnx wrote:
| > The Waymo World Model can convert those kinds of videos, or any
| taken with a regular camera, into a multimodal simulation--
| showing how the Waymo Driver would see that exact scene.
|
| Subtle brag that Waymo could drive in camera-only mode if they
| chose to. They've stated as much previously, but that doesn't
| seem widely known.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| I think I'm misunderstanding - they're converting video into
| their representation which was bootstrapped with LIDAR, video
| and other sensors. I feel you're alluding to Tesla, but Tesla
| could never have this outcome since they never had a LIDAR
| phase.
|
| (edit - I'm referring to deployed Tesla vehicles, I don't know
| what their research fleet comprises, but other commenters
| explain that this fleet does collect LIDAR)
| yakz wrote:
| Tesla does collect LIDAR data (people have seen them doing
| it, it's just not on all of the cars) and they do generate
| depth maps from sensor data, but from the examples I've seen
| it is much lower resolution than these Waymo examples.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Tesla does it to map the areas to come up with high def
| maps for areas where their cars try to operate.
| vardump wrote:
| Tesla uses lidar to train their models to generate depth
| data out of camera input. I don't think they have any
| high definition maps.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| They can and they do.
|
| https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=872
|
| They've also built it into a full neural simulator.
|
| https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=1063
|
| I think what we are seeing is that they both converged on the
| correct approach, one of them decided to talk about it, and
| it triggered disclosure all around since nobody wants to be
| seen as lagging.
| tfehring wrote:
| I watched that video around both timestamps and didn't see
| or hear any mention of LIDAR, only of video.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Exactly: they convert video into a world model
| representation suitable for 3D exploration and simulation
| without using LIDAR (except perhaps for scale
| calibration).
| tfehring wrote:
| My mistake - I misinterpreted your comment, but after re-
| reading more carefully, it's clear that the video
| confirms exactly what you said.
| IhateAI_3 wrote:
| tesla is not impressive, I would never put my child in one
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I've always wondered... if Lidar + Cameras is always making the
| right decision, you should theoretically be able to take the
| output of the Lidar + Cameras model and use it as training data
| for a Camera only model.
| olex wrote:
| That's exactly what Tesla is doing with their validation
| vehicles, the ones with Lidar towers on top. They establish
| the "ground truth" from Lidar and use that to train and/or
| test the vision model. Presumably more "test", since they've
| most often been seen in Robotaxi service expansion areas
| shortly before fleet deployment.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| Is that exactly true though? Can you give a reference for
| that?
| olex wrote:
| I don't have a specific source, no. I think it was
| mentioned in one of their presentation a few years back,
| that they use various techniques for "ground truth" for
| vision training, among those was time series (depth
| change over time should be continuous etc) and iirc also
| "external" sources for depth data, like LiDAR. And their
| validation cars equipped with LiDAR towers are definitely
| being seen everywhere they are rolling out their Robotaxi
| services.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| _are definitely being seen everywhere they are rolling
| out their Robotaxi services_
|
| So...nowhere?
| __alexs wrote:
| > you should theoretically be able to take the output of the
| Lidar + Cameras model and use it as training data for a
| Camera only model.
|
| Why should you be able to do that exactly? Human vision is
| frequently tricked by it's lack of depth data.
| scarmig wrote:
| "Exactly" is impossible: there are multiple Lidar samples
| that would map to the same camera sample. But what training
| would do is build a model that could infer the most likely
| Lidar representation from a camera representation. There
| would still be cases where the most likely Lidar for a
| camera input isn't a useful/good representation of reality,
| e.g. a scene with very high dynamic range.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Sure, but those models would never have online access to
| information only provided in lidar data...
| tfehring wrote:
| No, but if you run a shadow or offline camera-only model in
| parallel with a camera + LIDAR model, you can (1) measure
| how much worse the camera-only model is so you can decide
| when (if ever) it's safe enough to stop installing LIDAR,
| and (2) look at the specific inputs for which the models
| diverge and focus on improving the camera-only model in
| those situations.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| No, I don't think that will be successful. Consider a day
| where the temperature and humidity is just right to make tail
| pipe exhaust form dense fog clouds. That will be opaque or
| nearly so to a camera, transparent to a radar, and I would
| assume something in between to a lidar. Multi-modal sensor
| fusion is always going to be more reliable at classifying
| some kinds of challenging scene segments. It doesn't take
| long to imagine many other scenarios where fusing the returns
| of multiple sensors is going to greatly increase
| classification accuracy.
| shihab wrote:
| I think there are two steps here: converting video to sensor
| data input, and using that sensor data to drive. Only the
| second step will be handled by cars on road, first one is
| purely for training.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| The purpose of lidar is to prove error correction when you need
| it most in terms of camera accuracy loss.
|
| Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with both
| eyes.
| dbt00 wrote:
| (Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just
| based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance,
| which is why so many people get simulator sickness from
| stereoscopic 3d VR)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| My understanding is that contextual clues are a big part of
| it too. We see a the pitcher wind up and throw a baseball
| as us more than we stereoscopically track its progress from
| the mound to the plate.
|
| More subtly, a lot of depth information comes from how big
| we expect things to be, since everyday life is full of
| things we intuitively know the sizes of, frames of
| reference in the form of people, vehicles, furniture, etc .
| This is why the forced perspective of theme park castles is
| so effective-- our brains want to see those upper windows
| as full sized, so we see the thing as 2-3x bigger than it
| actually is. And in the other direction, a lot of buildings
| in Las Vegas are further away than they look because hotels
| like the Bellagio have large black boxes on them that group
| a 2x2 block of the actual room windows.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Actually the reason people experience vection in VR is not
| focal depth but the dissonance between what their eyes are
| telling them and what their inner ear and tactile senses
| are telling them.
|
| It's possible they get headaches from the focal length
| issues but that's different.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just
| based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance
|
| Also subtle head and eye movements, which is something a
| lot of people like to ignore when discussing camera-based
| autonomy. Your eyes are always moving around which changes
| the perspective and gives a much better view of depth as we
| observe parallax effects. If you need a better view in a
| given direction you can turn or move your head. Fixed
| cameras mounted to a car's windshield can't do either of
| those things, so you need many more of them at higher
| resolutions to even come close to the amount of data the
| human eye can gather.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I keep wondering about the focal depth problem. It feels
| potentially solvable, but I have no idea how. I keep
| wondering if it could be as simple as a Magic Eye
| Autostereogram sort of thing, but I don't think that's it.
|
| There have been a few attempts at solving this, but I
| assume that for some optical reason actual lenses need to
| be adjusted and it can't just be a change in the image?
| Meta had "Varifocal HMDs" being shown off for a bit, which
| I think literally moved the screen back and forth. There
| were a couple of "Multifocal" attempts with multiple
| stacked displays, but that seemed crazy. Computer Generated
| Holography sounded very promising, but I don't know if a
| good one has ever been built. A startup called Creal
| claimed to be able to use "digital light fields", which
| basically project stuff right onto the retina, which sounds
| kinda hogwashy to me but maybe it works?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with
| both eyes.
|
| Humans do this with vibes and instincts, not just depth
| perception. When I can't see the lines on the road because
| there's too much slow, I can still interpret where they would
| be based on my familiarity with the roads and my implicit
| knowledge of how roads work, e.g. We do similar things for
| heavy rain or fog, although, sometimes those situations truly
| necessitate pulling over or slowing down and turning on your
| 4s - lidar might genuinely given an advantage there.
| pookeh wrote:
| That's the purpose of the neural networks
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yes and no - vibes and instincts isn't just thought, it's
| real senses. Humans have a lot of senses; dozens of them.
| Including balance, pain, sense of passage of time, and
| body orientation. Not all of these senses are represented
| in autonomous vehicles, and it's not really clear how the
| brain mashes together all these senses to make decisions.
| pants2 wrote:
| Another way humans perceive depth is by moving our heads and
| perceiving parallax.
| menaerus wrote:
| How expensive is their lidar system?
| eptcyka wrote:
| Less than the lives it saves.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Hesai has driven the cost into the $200 to 400 range now.
| That said I don't know what they cost for the ones needed
| for driving. Either way we've gone from thousands or tens
| of thousands into the hundreds dollar range now.
| bragr wrote:
| Looking at prices, I think you are wrong and automotive
| Lidar is still in the 4 to 5 figure range. HESAI might
| ship Lidar units that cheap, but automotive grade still
| seems quite expensive:
| https://www.cratustech.com/shop/lidar/
| tzs wrote:
| Those are single unit prices. The AT128 for instance,
| which is listed at $6250 there and widely used by several
| Chinese car companies was around $900 per unit in high
| volume and over time they lowered that to around $400.
|
| The next generation of that, the ATX, is the one they
| have said would be half that cost. According to regulator
| filings in China BYD will be using this on entry level
| $10k cars.
|
| Hesai got the price down for their new generation by
| several optimizations. They are using their own designs
| for lasers, receivers, and driver chips which reduced
| component counts and material costs. They have stepped up
| production to 1.5 million units a year giving them mass
| production efficiencies.
| bragr wrote:
| That model only has a 120 degree field of view so you'd
| need 3-4 of them per car (plus others for blind spots,
| they sell units for that too). That puts the total system
| cost in the low thousands, not the 200 to 400 stated by
| GP. I'm not saying it hasn't gotten cheaper or won't keep
| getting cheaper, it just doesn't seem that cheap yet.
| xnx wrote:
| Cheaper every year.
| hijnksforall wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Tesla told us their strategy was vertical integration and
| scale to drive down all input costs in manufacturing
| these vehicles...
|
| ...oh, except lidar, that's going to be expensive
| forever, for some reason?
| jmux wrote:
| Waymo does their LiDAR in-house, so unfortunately we don't
| know the specs or the cost
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Otto and Uber and the CEO of https://pronto.ai do though
| (tongue-in-cheek)
|
| > Then, in December 2016, Waymo received evidence
| suggesting that Otto and Uber were actually using Waymo's
| trade secrets and patented LiDAR designs. On December 13,
| Waymo received an email from one of its LiDAR-component
| vendors. The email, which a Waymo employee was copied on,
| was titled OTTO FILES and its recipients included an
| email alias indicating that the thread was a discussion
| among members of the vendor's "Uber" team. Attached to
| the email was a machine drawing of what purported to be
| an Otto circuit board (the "Replicated Board") that bore
| a striking resemblance to - and shared several unique
| characteristics with - Waymo's highly confidential
| current-generation LiDAR circuit board, the design of
| which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his
| resignation.
|
| The presiding judge, Alsup, said, "this is the biggest
| trade secret crime I have ever seen. This was not small.
| This was massive in scale."
|
| (Pronto connection: Levandowski got pardoned by Trump and
| is CEO of Pronto autonomous vehicles.)
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/waymo-
| googles-se...
| ra7 wrote:
| We know Waymo reduced their LiDAR price from $75,000 to
| ~$7500 back in 2017 when they started designing them in-
| house: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-
| waymo-invests-i...
|
| That was 2 generations of hardware ago (4th gen Chrysler
| Pacificas). They are about to introduce 6th gen hardware.
| It's a safe bet that it's much cheaper now, given how
| mass produced LiDARs cost ~$200.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Human depth perception uses stereo out to only about 2 or 3
| meters, after which the distance between your eyes is not a
| useful baseline. Beyond 3m we use context clues and depth
| from motion when available.
| aylons wrote:
| Thanks, saved some work.
|
| And I'll add that it in practice it is not even that much
| unless you're doing some serious training, like a
| professional athlete. For most tasks, the accurate depth
| perception from this fades around the length of the arms.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| ok, but a care is a few meters wide, isn't that enough for
| driving depth perception similar to humans
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The depths you are trying to estimate are to the other
| cars, people, turnings, obstacles, etc. Could be 100m
| away or more on the highway.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| ok, but the point trying to be made is based on human's
| depth perception, but a car's basic limitation is the
| width of the vehicle, so there's missing information if
| you're trying to figure out if a car can use cameras to
| do what human eyes/brains do.
| mycall wrote:
| That is still important for safety reasons in case someone uses
| a LiDAR jamming system to try to force you into an accident.
| Jyaif wrote:
| If somebody wants to hurt you while you are traveling in a
| car, there are simpler ways.
| etrautmann wrote:
| It's way easier to "jam" a camera with bright light than a
| lidar, which uses both narrow band optical filters and pulsed
| signals with filters to detect that temporal sequence. If I
| were an adversary, going after cameras is way way easier.
| sroussey wrote:
| Oh yeah, point a q-beam at a Tesla at night, lol.
| Blindness!
| dooglius wrote:
| They may be trying to suggest that, that claim does not follow
| from the quoted statement.
| sschueller wrote:
| Autonomous cars need to be significantly better than humans to
| be fully accepted especially when an accident does happen.
| Hence limiting yourself to only cameras is futile.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| What's going to happen to all the millions of drivers who will
| lose their job overnight? In a country with 100 million guns, are
| we really sure we've thought this through?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, let's stop all progress and roll-back all automation to
| keep hypothetical angry people with guns happy.
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Seems like a good description on current events.
| runarberg wrote:
| Autonomous private cars is not the technological progress you
| think it is. We've had autonomous trains for decades, and
| while it provides us with a more efficient and cost effective
| public transit system, it didn't open the doors for the next
| revolutionary technology.
|
| Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will
| introduce a whole host of new problems which are already
| solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
| pnut wrote:
| Nope. Humans are statistically fallible and their attention
| is too valuable to be obliged to a mundane task like
| executing navigation commands. Redesigning and rebuilding
| city transportation infrastructure isn't happening, look
| around. Also personal agency limits public transportation
| as a solution.
| runarberg wrote:
| Unlike autonomous driving, public transit is a proven
| solution employed in thousands of cities around the
| world, on various scales, economies, etc.
|
| > Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation
| infrastructure isn't happening, look around.
|
| We have been redesigning and rebuilding city
| transportation infrastructure since we had cities. Where
| I live (Seattle) they are opening a new light rail bridge
| crossing just next month (first rail over a floting
| bridge; which is technologically very interesting), and
| two new rail lines are being planned. In the 1960s the
| Bay area completely revolutionized their transit sytem
| when they opened BART.
|
| I think you are simply wrong here.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> In the 1960s the Bay area completely revolutionized
| their transit sytem when they opened BART.
|
| 66 years later we see California struggling terribly with
| implementation of a high-speed rail system -- where the
| placement/location of the infrastructure largely is
| targeted for areas far less dense than the Bay Area.
|
| I don't think there is any single reason why this is so
| much more difficult now then it was in 1960 -- but
| clearly things have changed quite a lot in that time.
| askl wrote:
| > Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation
| infrastructure isn't happening, look around.
|
| The US already did it once (just in the wrong direction)
| by redesigning all cities to be unfriendly to humans and
| only navigable by cars. It should be technically possible
| to revert that mistake.
| sekai wrote:
| > We've had autonomous trains for decades
|
| Trains need tracks, cars - already have the infrastructure
| to drive on.
|
| > Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will
| introduce a whole host of new problems which are already
| solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
|
| Self driving cars will literally become a part of public
| transit
| runarberg wrote:
| > Self driving cars will literally become a part of
| public transit
|
| I've been hearing people say that for almost 15 years
| now. I believe it when I see it.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> I believe it when I see it.
|
| I'm willing to wager that you might not actually believe
| it at that point either.
| xnx wrote:
| > Self driving cars is a dead end technology
|
| I would be happy to bet on some strict definition of your
| claim.
| drewmate wrote:
| Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been
| planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density
| that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will
| solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility
| limited, and just about everyone else.
|
| It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I
| think we've been through worse disruptions and fared the
| better for it.
| skybrian wrote:
| If Waymo's history is any guide, it's not going to happen
| overnight. Even in San Francisco, their market share is only
| 20-30%.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Those are rookie numbers. The US has 400 million guns.
| https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-gun-owners...
|
| As to the revolt, America doesn't do that any more. Years of
| education have removed both the vim and vigor of our souls.
| People will complain. They will do a TikTok dance as protest.
| Some will go into the streets. No meaningful uprising will
| occur.
|
| The poor and the affected will be told to go to the trades.
| That's the new learn to program. Our tech overlords will have
| their media tell us that everything is ok (packaging it
| appropriately for the specific side of the aisle).
|
| Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium. Not
| terrible, but not a world dominating, hand cutting entity it
| once was.
| markvdb wrote:
| > Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium.
|
| Sharing one's opinion in a respectful way is possible. Less
| spectacle, so less eyeballs, but worth it. Try it.
| nubg wrote:
| What's wrong with his comparison? He explained what he
| meant by "a Belgium".
| tanseydavid wrote:
| The entire side topic of guns and revolt seems misplaced
| in this thread.
|
| The original Luddite movement arose in response to
| automation in the textile industry.
|
| They committed violence. Violence was committed against
| them. All tragic events when viewed from a certain
| perspective.
|
| My rhetorical question is this: did any of this result in
| any meaningful impedance of the "march of technological
| progress"?
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium.
|
| I'm curious why you say this given you start by highlighting
| several characteristics that are not like Belgium (to wit,
| poor education, political media capture, effective
| oligarchy). I feel there are several other nations that may
| be better comparators, just want to understand your
| selection.
| paxys wrote:
| Waymo has been operating since 2004 (22 years ago), and
| replacing drivers on the road will take many more decades.
| Nothing is happening "overnight".
| lanthissa wrote:
| same thing that happened during the industrial revolution, you
| pay enough of them to 'protect the law' vs the rest.
| sigspec wrote:
| UBI or war, or both
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I don't think Uber goes out of business. There is probably a
| sweet spot for Waymo's steady state cars, and you STILL might
| want 'surge' capabilities for part time workers who can
| repurpose their cars to make a little extra money here and
| there.
| sekai wrote:
| > What's going to happen to all the millions of drivers who
| will lose their job overnight? In a country with 100 million
| guns, are we really sure we've thought this through?
|
| Same was said about electricity, or the internet.
| password54321 wrote:
| People keep referencing history but this really is
| unprecedented. We are approaching singularity and many people
| will become obsolete in all areas. There are no new
| hypothetical jobs waiting on the horizon.
| sroussey wrote:
| Reminds me of the history or radio and the absolute uproar that
| someone played a record on the radio rather than live
| performances!!
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| "Autonomous"
|
| https://cybernews.com/news/waymo-overseas-human-agents-robot...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| My understanding is that support is basically playing an RTS
| (point and click), not a 1P driving game. Which makes sense, if
| they were directly controlling the vehicles they'd put support
| in central America for better latency, like the food delivery
| bot drivers
| jonas21 wrote:
| Yeah. Waymo described how this works a couple of years ago:
|
| https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Right, I totally believe Waymo, just like I totally
| believed Amazon's checkout-less stores.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This isn't news, they've always acknowledged that they have
| remote navigators that tell the cars what to do when they get
| stuck or confused. It's just that they don't directly drive the
| car.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Still needs to be trained on the final boss: dense cities with
| narrow streets.
| xnx wrote:
| What would be an example city? Waymo just announced they're
| ramping up in Boston: https://waymo.com/blog/?modal=short-back-
| to-boston
|
| "we're excited to continue effectively adapting to Boston's
| cobblestones, narrow alleyways, roundabouts and turnpikes."
| ginko wrote:
| Not grandparent but I was rather thinking of medieval city
| centers in Italy or Spain.
|
| edit: Case in point:
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/xxYQWHrzSMES8HPL8
|
| This is an alley in Coimbra, Portugal. A couple years ago I
| stayed at a hotel in this very street and took a cab from the
| train station. The driver could have stopped in the praca
| below and told me to walk 15m up. Instead the guy went all
| the way up then curved through 5-10 alleys like that to drop
| me off right right in front of my place. At a significant
| speed as well. It was one of the craziest car rides I've ever
| experienced.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Do we really need FSD cars (any cars, actually) in medieval
| city centers?
| pants2 wrote:
| Any small city in Italy is going to be 10X more challenging
| than Boston
| threetonesun wrote:
| Depends, which is harder: a narrow street or a three lane
| one with no obvious lane markers with people double
| parking?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| and the failure mode for some of them are steep drops off
| of cliffs
| chasd00 wrote:
| the absolute chaos of Paris would also be challenging.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Various European cities come to mind: Narrow streets are
| something of a trope in certain movies/genres.
| jkaptur wrote:
| To be fair, many of those films do not portray human
| drivers in the best light.
| reluctant_dev wrote:
| San Francisco isn't uniformly dense and narrow, but it does
| have both, and it's run remarkably well so far.
| elliotec wrote:
| Another comment mentioned the Philippines as the manifest
| frontier. SF is not on the same plane of reality in terms of
| density or narrow streets as PH, I would argue in comparison
| it does not have both.
| fragmede wrote:
| On that specific count, not really. There's a skate park
| north end of the Mission, and Stevenson St is a two way road
| that borders it, but it's narrow enough that you need to
| drive up on the curb to get two vehicles side by side on the
| street. Waymo's can't handle that on a regular basis. Being
| San Francisco and not London, you can just skip that road,
| but if you find yourself in a Waymo on that street and are
| unlucky to have other traffic on it, the Waymo will just have
| to back up the entire street. Hope there's no one behind you
| as well as in front of you!
|
| Anyway, we'll see how the London rollout goes, but I get the
| impression London's got a lot more of those kinds of roads.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Stevenson St is a two way road
|
| That is extremely narrow, I wonder why the city has not
| designated it as a one-way street? They've done that for
| other similarly narrow sections of the same street farther
| north.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| This is the craziest I've seen, but it was 10 months ago
| which is ~10 years in AI years
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I live in such an area. The route to my house involves steep
| topography via small windy streets that are very narrow and
| effectively one-way due to parked cars.
|
| Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or
| 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation
| better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.
|
| As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get
| palpably angry at me for driving the route.
| dandaka wrote:
| Yes, something like Ho Chi Minh or Mumbai in a peak hour! With
| lots of bike riders, pedestrians, and livestock at the same
| roundabout.
| seydor wrote:
| Napoli
| pja wrote:
| Waymo cars are driving around London right now.
|
| Not taking paying passengers yet though!
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| Like London? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does it, though? Maybe Dhaka will never get Waymo. The same way
| you can't get advanced gene therapy there.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Old Delhi is the the final boss.
| chpatrick wrote:
| They're being trialled in London right now.
| NullHypothesist wrote:
| I wonder if they can simulate the Beatles crossing the street at
| Abbey Road in the late '60s
| seanhunter wrote:
| As a Londoner who used to have to ride up Abbey Road at least
| once per week there are people on that crossing pretty much all
| day every day reproducing that picture. So now Waymo are in
| Beta in London[1] they have only to drive up there and they'll
| get plenty of footage they could use for taht.
|
| [1] I've seen a couple of them but they're not available to
| hire yet and are still very rare.
| permenant wrote:
| Will Google finally fund Christopher Wren's post great fire
| "wide streets" rebuild of the City?
| ddalex wrote:
| i think we might need aother great fire to widen the
| streets at this point
| devmor wrote:
| Wow, interesting timing for this PR blast considering the
| admission in the Senate Commerce Committee hearing. Not
| transparent at all!
| WarmWash wrote:
| What was the admission? That they use cheap labor to provide
| the waymo clarity when it is confused? That has been known for
| a long time.
| ra7 wrote:
| The novel aspect here seems to be 3D LiDAR output from 2D video
| using post-training. As far as I'm aware, no other video world
| models can do this.
|
| IMO, access to DeepMind and Google infra is a hugely understated
| advantage Waymo has that no other competitor can replicate.
| codexb wrote:
| 3d from moving 2d images has been a thing for decades.
| ra7 wrote:
| This is 3D _LiDAR_ output (multimodal) from 2D images.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| LiDAR is the technology used to do spatial capture. The
| output is just point clouds of surfaces. So they're
| generating surface point clouds from video
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's not unheard of, there are a handful [0] of metric
| monodepth methods that output data that's not unlike a really
| inaccurate 3D lidar, though theirs certainly looks SOTA.
|
| [0] https://github.com/YvanYin/Metric3D
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Imagine driving in a Waymo 'out of a raging fire'.
|
| Talk about edge cases.
|
| But, what would you do? Trust the Waymo, or get out (or never get
| in) at the first sign of trouble?
| breckinloggins wrote:
| Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to
| remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay
| in it.
|
| This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over"
| feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen
| actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull
| over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I
| would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these
| vehicles.
| tensor wrote:
| Can you not just unlock and open the door? Wouldn't that
| cause it to immediately stop? Or can you not unlock the door
| manually? I'd be surprised if there was not an emergency door
| release.
| bragr wrote:
| >it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions
| involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over
| immediately
|
| It was on the home screen when I've taken it, and when I
| tested it, it seemed to pull to the first safe place. I don't
| trust the general pubic with a stop button.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| Imagine how many drunk/careless passengers might press it.
| Stopping in the middle of the street or highway could be a
| serious safety hazard.
| arctic-true wrote:
| I feel like this ends with drunk morons accidentally creating
| Waymo barricades and totally ruining Mardi Gras
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I can! If the Waymo got you into one on the way home because
| Google didn't integrate with watch duty yet, that's plausible
| jimt1234 wrote:
| This might be relevant to the timing here: https://eletric-
| vehicles.com/waymo/waymo-exec-admits-remote-...
| m0llusk wrote:
| Seems interesting, but why is it broken. Waymo repeatedly
| directed multiple automated vehicles into the private alley off
| of 5th near Brannan in SF even after being told none of them have
| any business there ever, period. If they can sense the weather
| and stuff then maybe they could put out a virtual sign or fence
| that notes what appears to be a road is neither a through way nor
| open to the public? I'm really bullish on automated driving long
| term, but now that vehicles are present for real we need to start
| to think about potentially getting serious about finding some way
| to get them to comply with the same laws that limit what people
| can do.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> get them to comply with the same laws that limit what people
| can do
|
| I think you meant, "Attempt" to limit what people can do.
|
| Driving in SF (for example) provides many opportunities to see
| "free will" exerted in the most extreme ways -- laws be damned.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| How many Filipinos, who do not have US drivers licenses, does it
| take to drive this new model?
| mellosouls wrote:
| Deepmind's Project Genie under the hood (pun intended). Deepmind
| & Waymo both Alphabet(Google) subsidiaries obv.
|
| https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-worl...
|
| Discussed here,eg.
|
| _Genie 3: A new frontier for world models (1510 points, 497
| comments)_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798166
|
| _Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
| (673 points, 371 comments)_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812933
| paxys wrote:
| Regardless of the corporate structure DeepMind is a lot more
| than just another Alphabet subsidiary at this point considering
| Demis Hassabis is leading all of Google AI.
| Kapura wrote:
| Interesting that this should come out right as lawmakers are
| beginning to understand that Waymos have overseas operators
| making major decisions.
|
| [*] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-
| wo...
| thethimble wrote:
| Why is this relevant at all?
|
| Having humans in the loop at some level is necessary for
| handling rare edge cases safely.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| If that's true the system isn't finished. That's what
| reasoning is for.
| sroussey wrote:
| Who ever said they were finished? You think the laid off
| the team since everything is "done"?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The word "loop" here has multiple meanings. Only one is what
| you mean and the other person responding to you has
| understood another.
|
| The first is the DDT control loop, what a human driver does.
| Waymo's remote assistants aren't involved in that. The
| computer always has responsibility for the safety of the
| vehicle and decisionmaking while operating, which is why
| Waymo's humans are remote _assistants_ and not remote
| _drivers_. Their safety drivers _do_ participate in the DDT
| loop, hence the name.
|
| But there's also another "loop" of human involvement.
| Sometimes the vehicle doesn't understand the scene and asks
| humans for advice about the appropriate action to take. It's
| vaguely similar to captchas. The human will usually confirm
| the computer's proposed actions, but they can also suggest
| different actions. The computer the advice as a prior to
| continue operating instead of giving up the DDT
| responsibility. There's very likely a closely monitored SLA
| between a few seconds to a few minutes on how long it takes
| humans to start looking at the scene.
|
| If something causes the computer to believe the advice isn't
| safe, it will ignore it. There have been cases where Waymos
| have erroneously detected collisions and remote assistants
| were unable to override that decisionmaking. When that
| happens, a vehicle recovery team is physically sent out to
| the location. The SLA here is likely between tens of minutes
| and a couple hours.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Completely false: https://x.com/i/status/2019213765506670738
|
| Listen to the statement.
|
| The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult
| situation".
|
| Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet
| fixed have a human intervene.
|
| Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Whenever something like this comes out, it's a good moment to
| find people with no critical thinking skills who can safely
| be ignored. Driving a waymo like an RC car from the
| philippines? you can barely talk over zoom with someone in
| the philippines without bitrate and lag issues.
| hijnksforall wrote:
| Hacker News has had some of the dumbest Tesla takes of all
| time. People should be embarrassed about some of the claims
| that were made here.
|
| And apparently some people still haven't caught on.
|
| Have a look if you don't believe me:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=fals
| e...
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Seems to be some ketamine on that boot.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Except that's not what the original posters said, rather
| 'operators making major decisions.' Don't strawman here, it
| wastes everyone's time.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| I haven't read anything about this but I would also suppose
| long distance human intervention cannot be done for truly
| critical situations where you need a very quick reaction,
| whereas it would be more appropriate in situations where the
| car has stopped and is stuck not knowing what to do. Probably
| just stating the obvious here but indeed this seems like
| something very different from an RC car kind of situation.
| sroussey wrote:
| It's not for that. It's for things like the car drove into
| a protest area and people are surrounding the car. Or
| police blocked off an intersection and the car is stuck
| temporarily with people doing otherwise illegal u-turns or
| driving the wrong way on a one way road to get out of it.
| mempko wrote:
| One interesting thing from this paper is how big of a LiDaR
| shadow there is around the waymo car which suggests they rely on
| cameras for anything close (maybe they have radar too?). Seems
| LiDaR is only useful for distant objects.
| xnx wrote:
| At least 6 radar units:
| https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190838?hl=en
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It doesn't look like they're going to open sources or anything,
| but I could imagine this would be great for city planning.
|
| Or the most realistic game of SimCity you could imagine.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to
| make sense. I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the
| same way as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is
| a robot of sorts.
|
| Google/Alphabet are so vertically integrated for AI when you
| think about it. Compare what they're doing - their own power
| generation , their own silicon, their own data centers, search
| Gmail YouTube Gemini workspace wallet, billions and billions of
| Android and Chromebook users, their ads everywhere, their browser
| everywhere, waymo, probably buy back Boston dynamics soon enough
| (they're recently partnered together), fusion research, drugs
| discovery.... and then look at ChatGPT's chatbot or grok's porn.
| Pales in comparison.
| smeeth wrote:
| I always understood this to be why Tesla started working on
| humanoid robots
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Pretty much. They banked on "if we can solve FSD, we can
| partially solve humanoid robot autonomy, because both are
| robots operating in poorly structured real world
| environments".
| smt88 wrote:
| They started working on humanoid robots because Musk always
| has to have the next moonshot, trillion-dollar idea to
| promise "in 3 years" to keep the stock price high.
|
| As soon as Waymo's massive robotaxi lead became undeniable,
| he pivoted to from robotaxis to humanoid robots.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Yeah, that and running Grok on a trillion GPUs in space lol
| jasondigitized wrote:
| I don't want a humanoid robot. I want a purpose built robot.
| simondotau wrote:
| Obviously both will exist and compete with each other on
| the margins. The thing to appreciate is that our physical
| world is already built like an API for adult humans.
| Swinging doors, stairs, cupboards, benchtops. If you want a
| robot to traverse the space and be useful for more than one
| task, the humanoid form makes sense.
|
| The key question is whether general purpose robots can
| outcompete on sheer economies of scale alone.
| Fricken wrote:
| It's so they can stick a Tesla logo on a bunch of chinese
| tech and call it innovation.
| mooktakim wrote:
| Tesla built something like this for FSD training, they
| presented many years ago. I never understood why they did
| productize it. It would have made a brilliant Maps alternative,
| which country automatically update from Tesla cars on the road.
| Could live update with speed cameras and road conditions. Like
| many things they've fallen behind
| jellojello wrote:
| Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard
| cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of
| elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've
| ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side
| camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.
| verelo wrote:
| Yeah its absurd. As a Tesla driver, I have to say the
| autopilot model really does feel like what someone who's
| never driven a car before thinks it's like.
|
| Using vision only is so ignorant of what driving is all
| about: sound, vibration, vision, heat, cold...these are all
| clues on road condition. If the car isn't feeling all these
| things as part of the model, you're handicapping it. In a
| brilliant way Lidar is the missing piece of information a
| car needs without relying on multiple sensors, it's
| probably superior to what a human can do, where as vision
| only is clearly inferior.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Maybe vision-only can work with much better cameras, with
| a wider spectrum (so they can see thru fog, for example),
| and self-cleaning/zero upkeep (so you don't have to pull
| over to wipe a speck of mud from them). Nevertheless,
| LIDAR still seems like the best choice overall.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| The inputs to FSD are: 7 cameras x
| 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s 48kHz audio Nav maps
| and route for next few miles 100Hz kinematics
| (speed, IMU, odometry, etc)
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571
| ambicapter wrote:
| So if they're already "fusioning" all these things, why
| would LIDAR be any different?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Tesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and
| Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular
| depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the
| time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR
| had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer
| struggled to perceive the 3D world around it.
|
| Also, integration effort went down but it never
| disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed when
| vision started working. Which layers would _you_ carve
| resources away from to make room? How far back would
| _you_ be willing to send the training + validation
| schedule to accommodate the change? If you saw your
| vision-only stack take off and blow past human
| performance on the march of 9s, would you land the plane
| just because red paint became available and you wanted to
| paint it red?
|
| I wouldn't completely discount ego either, but IMO
| there's more ego in the "LIDAR is necessary" case than
| the "LIDAR isn't necessary" at this point. FWIW, I used
| to be an outspoken LIDAR-head before 2021 when monocular
| depth estimation became a solved problem. It was funny
| watching everyone around me convert in the opposite
| direction at around the same time, probably driven by
| politics. I get it, I hate Elon's politics too, I just
| try very hard to keep his shitty behavior from
| influencing my opinions on machine learning.
| kanbara wrote:
| depth estimation is but one part of the problem--
| atmospheric and other conditions which blind optical
| visible spectrum sensors, lack of ambient (sunlight) and
| more. lidar simply outperforms (performs at all?) in
| these conditions. and provides hardware back distance
| maps, not software calculated estimation
| gibolt wrote:
| Lidar fails worse than cameras in nearly all those
| conditions. There are plenty of videos of Tesla's vision-
| only approach seeing obstacles far before a human
| possibly could in all those conditions on real customer
| cars. Many are on the old hardware with far worse cameras
| kranke155 wrote:
| Always thought the case was for sensor redundancy and
| data variety - the stuff that throws off monocular depth
| estimation might not throw off a lidar or radar.
| 7e wrote:
| Monocular depth estimation can be fooled by adversarial
| images, or just scenes outside of its distribution. It's
| a validation nightmare and a joke for high reliability.
| gibolt wrote:
| It isn't monocular though. A Tesla has 2 front-facing
| cameras, narrow and wide-angle. Beyond that, it is only
| neural nets at this point, so depth estimation isn't
| directly used; it is likely part of the neural net, but
| only the useful distilled elements.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| I never said it was. I was using it as a lower bound for
| what was possible.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good
| by 2021_
|
| It's still rather weak and true monocular depth
| estimation really wasn't spectacularly anything in 2021.
| It's fundamentally ill posed and any priors you use to
| get around that will come to bite you in the long tail of
| things some driver will encounter on the road.
|
| The way it got good is by using camera overlap in space
| and over time while in motion to figure out metric depth
| over the entire image. Which is, humorously enough,
| sensor fusion.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| It was spectacularly good before 2021, 2021 is just when
| I noticed that it had become spectacularly good. 7.5
| billion miles later, this appears to have been the
| correct call.
| verelo wrote:
| Better than I expected. So this was 3 days ago, is this
| for all previously models or is there a cut off date
| here?
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Fog, heavy rain, heavy snow, people running between cars
| or from an obstructed view...
|
| None of these technologies can ever be 100%, so we're
| basically accepting a level of needless death.
|
| Musk has even shrugged off FSD related deaths as,
| "progress".
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Humans: 70 deaths in 7 billion miles
|
| FSD: 2 deaths in 7 billion miles
|
| Looks like FSD saves lives by a margin so fat it can
| probably survive most statistical games.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Is that the official Tesla stat? I've heard of way more
| Tesla fatalities than that..
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| This is absolutely a Musk defender. FSD and Tesla related
| deaths are much higher.
|
| https://www.tesladeaths.com/index-amp.html
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Autopilot is the shitty lane assist. FSD is the SOTA
| neural net.
|
| Your link agrees with me:
|
| > 2 fatalities involving the use of FSD
| Fricken wrote:
| I don't know what he's on about. Here's a better list:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_cra
| she...
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Autopilot is the shitty lane assist. FSD is the SOTA
| neural net.
|
| Your link agrees with me:
|
| > two that NHTSA's Office of Defect Investigations
| determined as happening during the engagement of Full
| Self-Driving (FSD) after 2022.
| simondotau wrote:
| There are a sizeable number of deaths associated with the
| abuse of Tesla's adaptive cruise control with lane
| cantering (publicly marketed as "autopilot"). Such
| features are commonplace on many new cars and it is
| unclear whether Tesla is an outlier, because no one is
| interested in obsessively researching cruise control
| abuse among other brands.
|
| There are two deaths associated with FSD.
| elgenie wrote:
| Isn't there a great deal of gaming going on with the car
| disengaging FSD milliseconds before crashing? Voila, no
| "full" "self" driving accident; just another human
| failing [*]!
|
| [*] Failing to solve the impossible situation FSD dropped
| them into, that is.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Nope. NHTSA's criteria for reporting is active-
| within-30-seconds.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-
| orde...
|
| If there's gamesmanship going on, I'd expect the antifan
| site linked below to have different numbers, but it
| agrees with the 2 deaths figure for FSD.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Autopilot hasn't been updated in years and is nothing
| like FSD. FSD does use all of those cues.
| verelo wrote:
| I misspoke, i'm using Hardware 3 FSD.
| torginus wrote:
| I quickly googled Lidar limitations, and this article
| came up:
|
| https://www.yellowscan.com/knowledge/how-weather-really-
| affe...
|
| Seeing how its by a lidar vendor, I don't think they're
| biased against it. It seems Lidar is not a panacea - it
| struggles with heavy rain, snow, much more than cameras
| do and is affected by cold weather or any contamination
| on the sensor.
|
| So lidar will only get you so far. I'm far more
| interested in mmwave radar, which while much worse in
| spatial resolution, isn't affected by light conditions,
| weather, can directly measure stuff on the thing its
| illuminating, like material properties, the speed its
| moving, the thickness.
|
| Fun fact: mmWave based presence sensors can measure your
| hearbeat, as the micro-movements show up as a frequency
| component. So I'd guess it would have a very good chance
| to detect a human.
|
| I'm pretty sure even with much more rudimentary
| processing, it'll be able to tell if its looking at a
| living being.
|
| By the way: what happened to the idea that self-driving
| cars will be able to talk to each other and combine each
| other's sensor data, so if there are multiple ones
| looking at the same spot, you'd get a much improved
| chance of not making a mistake.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that
| weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran
| most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended
| up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on
| purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that
| significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| he didn't refuse it. MobileEye or whoever cut Tesla off
| because they were using the lidar sensors in a way he
| didn't approve. From there he got mad and said "no more
| lidar!"
| iknowstuff wrote:
| False. Mobileye never used lidar. Lmao where do you all
| come up with this
| agildehaus wrote:
| https://www.mobileye.com/news/mobileye-to-end-internal-
| lidar...
|
| Um, yes they did.
|
| No idea if it had any relation to Tesla though.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Did not
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I think Elon announced Tesla was ditching LIDAR in
| 2019.[0] This was before Mobileye offered LIDAR. Mobileye
| has used LIDAR from Luminar Technologies around
| 2022-2025. [1][2] They were developing their own lidar,
| but cancelled it. [3] They chose Innoviz Technologies as
| their LIDAR partner going forward for future product
| lines. [4]
|
| 0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-
| lidar-is...
|
| 1: https://static.mobileye.com/website/corporate/media/ra
| dar-li...
|
| 2: https://www.luminartech.com/updates/luminar-
| accelerates-comm...
|
| 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvg9heQObyQ&t=48s
|
| 4: https://ir.innoviz.tech/news-events/press-
| releases/detail/13...
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Never with the product used by Tesla early on.
| Fricken wrote:
| The original Mobileye EyeQ3 devices that Tesla began
| installing in their cars in 2013 had only a single
| forward facing camera. They were very simple devices,
| only intended to be used for lane keeping. Tesla hacked
| the devices and pushed them beyond their safe design
| constraints.
|
| Then that guy got decapitated when his Model S drove
| under a semi-truck that was crossing the highway and
| Mobileye terminated the contract. Weirdly, the same fatal
| edge case occurred 2 more times at least on Tesla's newer
| hardware.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_cra
| she...
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Thank you!
| semiquaver wrote:
| Assuming what you say is true, are they the only LIDAR
| vendor?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| His stated reason was that he wanted the team focused on
| the driving problem, not sensor fusion "now you have two
| problems" problems. People assumed cost was the real
| reason, but it seems unfair to blame him for what people
| assumed. Don't get me wrong, I don't like him either, but
| that's not due to his autonomous driving leadership
| decisions, it's because of shitting up twitter, shitting
| up US elections with handouts, shitting up the US
| government with DOGE, seeking Epstein's "wildest party,"
| DARVO every day, and so much more.
| jellojello wrote:
| Sensor fusion is an issue, one that is solvable over time
| and investment in the driving model, but sensor-
| can't-see-anything is a show stopper.
|
| Having a self-driving solution that can be totally turned
| off with a speck of mud, heavy rain, morning dew, bright
| sunlight at dawn and dusk.. you can't engineer your way
| out of sensor-blindness.
|
| I don't want a solution that is available to use 98% of
| the time, I want a solution that is always-available and
| can't be blinded by a bad lighting condition.
|
| I think he did it because his solution always used the
| crutch of "FSD Not Available, Right hand Camera is
| Blocked" messaging and "Driver Supervision" as the
| backstop to any failure anywhere in the stack. Waymo had
| no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always
| Available and Safe" and work backwards on price.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| LIDAR is notoriously easy to blind, what are you on
| about? Bonus meme: LIDAR blinds you(r iPhone camera)!
| ciberado wrote:
| That one was motivated by the need of controlling the app
| distribution channel, just like they keep the web as a
| second class citizen in their ecosystem nowadays.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| I have HW3, but FSD reliably disengages at this time of
| year with sunrise and sunset during commute hours.
| jellojello wrote:
| Yep, and won't activate until any morning dew is off the
| sensors.. or when it rains too hard.. or if it's blinded
| by a shiny building/window/vehicle.
|
| I will never trust 2d camera-only, it can be covered or
| blocked physically and when it happens FSD fails.
|
| As cheap as LIDAR has gotten, adding it to every new
| tesla seems to be the best way out of this idiotic
| position. Sadly I think Elon got bored with cars and
| moved on.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| FSD14 on hw4 does not. Its dynamic range is equivalent or
| better than human.
| kypro wrote:
| From the perspective of viewing FSD as an engineering
| problem that needs solving I tend to think Elon is on to
| something with the camera-only approach - although I would
| agree the current hardware has problems with weather, etc.
|
| The issue with lidar is that many of the difficult edge-
| cases of FSD are all visible-light vision problems. Lidar
| might be able to tell you there's a car up front, but it
| can't tell you that the car has it's hazard lights on and a
| flat tire. Lidar might see a human shaped thing in the
| road, but it cannot tell whether it's a mannequin leaning
| against a bin or a human about to cross the road.
|
| Lidar gets you most of the way there when it comes to
| spatial awareness on the road, but you need cameras for
| most of the edge-cases because cameras provide the color
| data needed to understand the world.
|
| You could never have FSD with just lidar, but you could
| have FSD with just cameras if you can overcome all of the
| hardware and software challenges with accurate 3D
| perception.
|
| Given Lidar adds cost and complexity, and most edge cases
| in FSD are camera problems, I think camera-only probably
| helps to force engineers to focus their efforts in the
| right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over
| depending on Lidar data. This isn't an argument for camera-
| only FSD, but from Tesla's perspective it does down costs
| and allows them to continue to produce appealing cars -
| which is obviously important if you're coming at FSD from
| the perspective of an auto marker trying to sell cars.
|
| Finally, adding lidar as a redundancy once you've "solved"
| FSD with cameras isn't impossible. I personally suspect
| Tesla will eventually do this with their robotaxis.
|
| That said, I have no real experience with self-driving
| cars. I've only worked on vision problems and while lidar
| is great if you need to measure distances and not hit
| things, it's the wrong tool if you need to comprehend the
| world around you.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| This is so wild to read when Waymo is _currently_ doing
| like 500,000 paid rides _every week_ , all over the
| country, with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile
| Tesla seems to have a handful of robotaxis in Austin, and
| it's unclear if any of them are actually driverless.
|
| But the Tesla engineers are "in the right place rather
| than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar
| data"? What?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Tesla has driven 7.5B autonomous miles to Waymo's 0.2B,
| but yes, Waymo looks like they are ahead when you
| stratify the statistics according to the ass-in-driver-
| seat variable and neglect the stratum that makes Tesla
| look good.
|
| The real question is whether doing so is smart or dumb.
| Is Tesla hiding big show-stopper problems that will
| prevent them from scaling without a safety driver? Or are
| the big safety problems solved and they are just
| finishing the Robotaxi assembly line that will crank out
| more vertically-integrated purpose-designed cars than
| Waymo's entire fleet every day before lunch?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Tesla's also been involved in WAY more accidents than
| Waymo - and has tried to silence those people, claim FSD
| wasn't active, etc.
|
| What good is a huge fleet of Robotaxis if no one will
| trust them? I won't ever set foot in a Robotaxi, as long
| as Elon is involved.
| kypro wrote:
| There's more Tesla's on the road than Waymo's by several
| orders of magnitude. Additionally the types of roads and
| conditions Tesla's drive under is completely incomparable
| to Waymo.
| jamespo wrote:
| Yes that was accounted for above, but this isn't
| autonomous apples to apples
| jasondigitized wrote:
| semi autonomous
| kypro wrote:
| I wasn't arguing Tesla is ahead of Waymo? Nor do I think
| they are. All I was arguing was that it makes sense from
| the perspective of a consumer automobile maker to not use
| lidar.
|
| I don't think Tesla is that far behind Waymo though given
| Waymo has had a significant head start, the fact Waymo
| has always been a taxi-first product, and given they're
| using significantly more expensive tech than Tesla is.
|
| Additionally, it's not like this is a lidar vs cameras
| debate. Waymo also uses and needs cameras for FSD for the
| reasons I mentioned, but they supplement their robotaxis
| with lidar for accuracy and redundancy.
|
| My guess is that Tesla will experiment with lidar on
| their robotaxis this year because design decisions should
| differ from those of a consumer automobile. But I could
| be wrong because if Tesla wants FSD to work well on
| visually appealing and affordable consumer vehicles then
| they'll probably have to solve some of the additional
| challenges with with a camera-only FSD system. I think it
| will depend on how much Elon decides Tesla needs to pivot
| into robotaxis.
|
| Either way, what is undebatable is that you can't drive
| with lidar only. If the weather is so bad that cameras
| are useless then Waymos are also useless.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to
| no-lidar.
|
| I thought it was the Nazi salutes on stage and backing neo-
| nazi groups everywhere around the world, but you know, I
| guess the lidar thing too.
| berryg wrote:
| No Lidar anymore on the 2026 Volvo models ES60 and EX60. See
| for example: https://www.jalopnik.com/2032555/volvo-ends-
| luminar-lidar-20...
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I love Volvo, am considering buying one in a couple weeks
| actually, but they're doing nothing interesting in terms of
| ADAS, as far as I can tell. It seems like they're limited
| to adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, both of which
| have been solved problems for more than a decade.
|
| It sounds like they removed Lidar due to supplier issues
| and availability, not because they're trying to build self-
| driving cars and have determined they don't need it
| anymore.
| nfg wrote:
| I'd suggest doing some research on software quality. Two
| years back I was all for buying one (I was considering an
| EX40), but I got myself into some Facebook groups for
| owners and was shocked at the dreadful reports of quality
| of the software and it completely put me off. I got an
| ID4 instead. Reports about the EX90 have been dreadful. I
| was very interested, and I still admire their look and
| build when they drive by - but it killed my enthusiasm to
| buy one for a few years until they get it right.
| nwienert wrote:
| [delayed]
| ruszki wrote:
| Is lane keeping really a solved problem? Just last year
| one of my brand new rented cars tried to kill me a few
| times when I tried it again, and so far not even the
| simple lane leaving detection mechanism worked properly
| in any of the tried cars when it was raining.
| xnx wrote:
| > Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts
| to make sense
|
| Google's been thinking about world models since at least 2018:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122
| anp wrote:
| FWIW I understood GP to mean that it suddenly makes sense to
| them, not that there's been a sudden focus shift at google.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| "Waymo as a robot in the same way"
|
| Erm, a dishwasher, washing machine, automated vacuum can be
| considered robots. Im confused as to this obsession of the term
| - there are many robots that already exist. Robotics have been
| involved in the production of cars for decades.
|
| ......
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I think the (gray) line is the degree of autonomy. My washing
| machine makes very small, predictable decisions, while a
| Waymo has to manage uncertainty most of the time.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Its irrelevant. A robot is a robot.
|
| Dictionary def: "a machine controlled by a computer that is
| used to perform jobs automatically."
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| TIL fuel injectors are robots. Probably my ceiling lights
| too.
|
| Maybe we need to nitpick about what a job is exactly? Or
| we could agree to call Waymos (semi)autonomous robots?
| mattlondon wrote:
| No one is denying that robots existed already (but I
| would hardly call a dishwasher a robot FWIW)
|
| But in my mind a waymo was always a "car with sensors",
| but more recently (especially having recently used them a
| bunch in California recently) I've come to think of them
| truly as robots.
| goatlover wrote:
| In the same way people online have argued helicopters are
| flying cars, it doesn't capture what most people mean
| when they use the word "robot", anymore than helicopters
| are what people have in mind when they mention flying
| cars.
| saghm wrote:
| A robot is a robot, and a human is a creature that won't
| necessarily agree with another human on what the
| definition of a word is. Dictionaries are also written by
| humans and don't necessarily reflect the current
| consensus, especially on terms where people's
| understanding might evolve over time as technology
| changes.
|
| Even if that definition were universally agreed on l upon
| though, that's not really enough to understand what the
| parent comment was saying. Being a robot "in the same
| way" as something else is even less objective. Humans are
| humans, but they're also mammals; is a human a mammal "in
| the same way" as a mouse? Most humans probably have a
| very different view of the world than most mice, and the
| parent comment was specifically addressing the question
| of whether it makes sense for an autonomous car to model
| the world the same way as other robots or not. I don't
| see how you can dismiss this as "irrelevant" because both
| humans and mice are mammals (or even animals; there's no
| shortage of classifications out there) unless you're
| completely having a different conversation than the
| person you responded to. You're not necessarily wrong
| because of that, but you're making a pretty significant
| misjudgment if you think that's helpful to them or to
| anyone else involved in the ongoing conversation.
| themafia wrote:
| It's a 3500lb robot that can kill you.
|
| Boston Robotics is working on a smaller robot that can kill
| you.
|
| Anduril is working on even smaller robots that can kill you.
|
| The future sucks.
| zzzeek wrote:
| and they're all controlled by (poorly compensated) humans
| anyway [1] [2]
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/i-tried-the-robot-
| tha...
|
| [2] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-
| controlled-wo...
| themafia wrote:
| They couldn't even make burger flipping robots work and are
| paying fast food workers $20/hr in California.
|
| If that doesn't make it obvious what they can and cannot do
| then I can't respect the tranche of "hackers" who blindly
| cheer on this unchecked corporate dystopian nightmare.
| dmd wrote:
| Which is why it's embarrassing how much worse Gemini is at
| searching the web for grounding information, and how incredibly
| bad gemini cli is.
| xnx wrote:
| Not my experience in either of those areas.
| coffeemug wrote:
| The vertical integration argument should apply to Grok. They
| have Tesla driving data (probably much more data than Waymo),
| Twitter data, plus Tesla/SpaceX manufacturing data. When/if
| Optimus starts on the production line, they'll have that data
| too. You could argue they haven't figured out how to take
| advantage of it, but the potential is definitely there.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Agreed. Should they achieve Google level integration, we will
| all make sure they are featured in our commentary. Their true
| potential is surely just around the corner...
| jeffbee wrote:
| "Tesla has more data than Waymo" is some of the lamest cope
| ever. Tesla does not have more video than Google! That's
| crazy! People who repeat this are crazy! If there was a
| massive flow of video from Tesla cars to Tesla HQ that would
| have observable side effects.
| thefounder wrote:
| But somehow google fails to execute. Gemini is useless for
| programming and I don't think even bother to use it as chat
| app. Claude code + gpt 5.2 xhigh for coding and gpt as chat app
| are really the only ones that are worth it(price and time wise)
| coffeemug wrote:
| I've recently switched to Claude for chat. GPT 5.2 feels very
| engagement-maxxed for me, like I'm reading a bad LinkedIn
| post. Claude does a tiny bit of this too, but an order of
| magnitude less in my experience. I never thought I'd switch
| from ChatGPT, but there is only so much "here's the brutal
| truth, it's not x it's y" I can take.
| aschla wrote:
| Experiencing the same. It seems Anthropic's human-focused
| design choices are becoming a differentiator.
| thechao wrote:
| GPT likes to _argue_ , and most of its arguments are straw
| man arguments, usually conflating priors. It's ...
| exhausting; akin to arguing on the internet. (What am I
| even saying, here!?) Claude's a lot less of that. I don't
| know if tracks discussion/conversation _better_ ; but, for
| damn sure, it's got way less verbal diarrhea than GPT.
| mrlongroots wrote:
| Yes, GPT5-series thinking models are extremely pedantic
| and tedious. Any conversation with them is derailed
| because they start nitpicking something random.
|
| But Codex/5.2 was substantially more effective than
| Claude at debugging complex C++ bugs until around Fall,
| when I was writing a lot more code.
|
| I find Gemini 3 useless. It has regressed on
| hallucinations from Gemini 2.5, to the point where its
| output is no better than a random token stream despite
| all its benchmark outperformance. I would use Gemini 2.5
| to help write papers and all, can't see to use Gemini 3
| for anything. Gemini CLI also is very non-compliant and
| crazy.
| thefounder wrote:
| To me ChatGPT seems smarter and knows more. That's why I
| use it. Even Claude rates gpt better for knowledge answers.
| Not sure if that itself is any indication. Claude seems
| superficial unless you hammer it to generate a good answer.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Gemini works well enough in Search and in Meet. And it's
| baked into the products so it's dead simple to use.
|
| I don't think Google is targeting developers with their AI,
| they are targeting their product's users.
| noelsusman wrote:
| It is a bit mind boggling how behind they were considering
| they invented transformers and were also sitting on the best
| set of training data in the world, but they've caught up
| quite a bit. They still lag behind in coding, but I've found
| Gemini to be pretty good at more general knowledge tasks.
| Flash 3 in particular is much better than anything of
| comparable price and speed from OpenAI or Anthropic.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Gemini is by far the best UI/UX designer model. Codex seems
| to the worst: it'll build something awkward and ugly, then
| Gemini will take 30-60 seconds to make it look like something
| that would have won a design award a couple years ago.
| phkahler wrote:
| Google has been doing more R&D and internal deployment of AI
| and less trying to sell it as a product. IMHO that difference
| in focus makes a huge difference. I used to think their early
| work on self-driving cars was primarily to support Street View
| in thier maps.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| It has always felt to me that the LLM chatbots were a
| surprise to Google, not LLMs, or machine learning in general.
| raphlinus wrote:
| Not true at all. I interacted with Meena[1] while I was
| there, and the _publication_ was almost three years before
| the release of ChatGPT. It was an unsettling experience,
| felt very science fiction.
|
| [1]: https://research.google/blog/towards-a-conversational-
| agent-...
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Well, I must say ChatGPT felt much more stable than Meena
| when I first tried it. But, as you said, it was a few
| years before ChatGPT was publicly announced :)
| hibikir wrote:
| The surprise was not that they existed: There were
| chatbots in Google way before ChatGPT. What surprised
| them was the demand, despite all the problems the
| chatbots have. The pig problem with LLMs was not that
| they could do nothing, but how to turn them into products
| that made good money. Even people in openAI were
| surprised about what happened.
|
| In many ways, turning tech into products that are useful,
| good, and don't make life hell is a more interesting
| issue of our times than the core research itself. We
| probably want to avoid the valuing capturing platform
| problem, as otherwise we'll end up seeing governments
| using ham fisted tools to punish winners in ways that
| aren't helpful either
| diamondage wrote:
| The uptake forced the bigger companies to act. With image
| diffusion models too - no corporate lawyer would let a
| big company release a product that allowed the customer
| to create any image...but when stable diffusion et al
| started to grow like they did...there was a specific
| price of not acting...and it was high enough to change
| boardroom decisions
| brokencode wrote:
| There was a point in time when basically every well known AI
| researcher worked at Google. They have been at the forefront
| of AI research and investing heavily for longer than anybody.
|
| It's kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real
| products and competitive large scale models from their
| research.
|
| But they are in full gear now that there is real competition,
| and it'll be cool to see what they release over the next few
| years.
| hosh wrote:
| I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a
| difference in this.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i
| know there was a round of PR re: him "coming back to help
| with AI." but just between you and me, the word on him
| internally, over years and multiple projects, was having
| him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting
| between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have
| unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same
| "you should" and doing it)
| pstuart wrote:
| That makes sense. A "secret shopper" might be a better
| way to avoid that but wouldn't give him the strokes of
| being the god in the room.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Oh ffs, we have an external investor who behaves like
| that. Literally set us back a year on pet nonsense
| projects and ideas.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had
| long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge.
|
| Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had _by far_ the
| most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A
| single intern could have kept the whole thing running,
| and Google has literal billions, but they couldn 't see
| the value in it.
|
| I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good
| portion of America is reading every day could have any
| value for an AI company, right?
|
| Google has always been terrible about turning tech into
| (viable, maintained) products.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| Is there an equivalent to Godwin's law wrt threads about
| Google and Google Reader?
|
| See also: any programming thread and Rust.
| jamespo wrote:
| Took a while but I got to the google reader post. Self
| host tt-rss, it's much better
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| How is this relevant? At best it's tangentially related
| and low effort
| burgreblast wrote:
| I never get the moaning about killing Reader. It was
| never about popularity or user experience.
|
| Reader had to be killed because it [was seen as] a
| suboptimal ad monetization engine. Page views were
| superior.
|
| Was Google going to support minimizing ads in any way?
| smallnix wrote:
| > It's kind of crazy that they have been slow to create
| real products and competitive large scale models from their
| research.
|
| I always thought they deliberately tried to contain the
| genie in the bottle as long as they could
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Google and OpenAI are both taking very big gambles with AI,
| with an eye towards 2036 not 2026. As are many others, but
| them in particular.
|
| It'll be interesting to see which pays off and which becomes
| Quibi
| jasondigitized wrote:
| The flywheel is starting to spin......
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Grok/xAI is a joke at this point. A true money pit without any
| hopes for a serious revenue stream.
|
| They should be bought by a rocket company. Then they would
| stand a chance.
| uoaei wrote:
| What an upsetting comment. I'm glad you came around but what
| did you think was going to be effective before you came around
| to world models?
| Dig1t wrote:
| >or grok's porn
|
| I know it's gross, but I would not discount this. Remember why
| Blu-ray won over HDDVD? I know it won for many other technical
| reasons, but I think there are a few historical examples of
| sexual content being a big competitive advantage.
| schiffern wrote:
| >I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the same way
| as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is a robot
| of sorts.
|
| So for the record, with this realization you're 3+ years behind
| Tesla.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODSJsviD_SU&t=3594s
| tapoxi wrote:
| Aren't they still using safety drivers or safety follow cars
| and in fewer cities? Seems Tesla is pretty far behind.
| schiffern wrote:
| What do you think I said that you're contradicting?
|
| IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a
| sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during
| the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used
| as a point against them.
|
| I'm comfortably with Tesla sparing no expense for safety,
| since I think we all (including Tesla) understand that this
| isn't the ultimate implementation. In fact, I think it
| would be a scandal if Tesla _failed_ to do exactly that.
|
| Damned if you do and damned if you don't, apparently.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I don't know if Tesla claiming they're doing something
| carries weight anymore.
| schiffern wrote:
| Setting aside the anti-Tesla bias, none of what I said
| relies on Tesla claims. The "chase vehicle" claims are
| all based on third-party accounts from actual rideshare
| customers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Internal firewalls and poor management means that the vast
| majority of integration opportunities are missed.
| Vosporos wrote:
| The new frontier is manifestly the Phillipines.
| elliotec wrote:
| Can you explain? I lived in PH, and my guess is that you mean
| navigating and modeling the unending and constantly changing
| chaos of the street systems (and lack thereof) is going to be a
| monumental task which I completely agree with. It would be an
| impressive feat if possible.
|
| Edit: or are you talking about the allegations of workers in
| the Philippines controlling the Waymos:
| https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...
| I guess both are valid.
| hazrmard wrote:
| cue the bell curve meme for learning autonomy:
| ____.----.____ ______/ \______
| _____/ \_____
| ________________________________________
| (simulations) (real world data) (simulations)
|
| Seems like it, no?
|
| We started with physics-based simulators for training policies.
| Then put them in the real world using modular
| perception/prediction/planning systems. Once enough data was
| collected, we went back to making simulators. This time, they're
| physics "informed" deep learning models.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's a very interesting way of looking at it. Yes, you start
| with simulating something simpler than the real world. Then you
| use the real world. Then you need to go back to simulations for
| real-world things that are too rare in the real world to train
| with.
|
| Seems like there ought to be a name for this, like so-and-so's
| law.
| buddhistdude wrote:
| hazrmard's law
| tgrowazay wrote:
| This page crashes my browser.
|
| Vivaldi 7.8.3931.63 on iOS 26.2.1 iPhone 16 pro
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| For whatever it's worth World models is going to be the dominant
| computing structure of the future
|
| I started working heavily on realizing them in 2016 and it is
| unquestionably (finally) the future of AI
| smcl wrote:
| The Waymo driving model: hire some guys in Philippines:
| https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...
| themafia wrote:
| Dig deep enough into any "AI" idea and you'll find the bottom
| end of the scam looks exactly like this.
|
| We've simply relabeled the "Mechanical Turk" into "AI."
|
| The rest is built on stolen copyrighted data.
|
| The new corporate model: "just lie the government clearly
| doesn't give a shit anymore."
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is not false, but gives the wrong idea that foreigners are
| driving them in real time.
|
| > After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas
| operators operate, Pena said he didn't have those stats,
| explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live
| much further away, including in the Philippines.
|
| > "They provide guidance," he argued. "They do not remotely
| drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain
| situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always
| in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one
| additional input."
| ddalex wrote:
| Have you read the article ? The guys in the Philippines are
| providing high level executive indications, they don't drive
| remotely the car or have any low level control of the car.
| andreyk wrote:
| This is quite misleading... From the article:
|
| "When the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on
| the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet
| response agent for additional information to contextualize its
| environment," the post reads. "The Waymo Driver [software] does
| not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet
| response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all
| times." [from Waymo's own blog
| https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/]
|
| What's the problem with this?
| ge96 wrote:
| What is the 5/3 tiles? Cameras?
| spaceywilly wrote:
| The model generates camera and Lidar data. As if it was a Waymo
| car that drove through the simulated scenario with its cameras
| running. This synthetic training data can then be used to train
| the driving models.
| ge96 wrote:
| Wonder how it'll do. The trees change shape (presumably the
| Lidar patterns do too). I get the premise/why but it seems
| odd to me (armchair) to use fake data. Real trees don't
| change shape (in real time) although it can be windy.
|
| It probably doesn't matter though, "this general blob over
| there"
| 01100011 wrote:
| Nvidia has had this for years. What am I missing?
| LowLevelKernel wrote:
| Instructions to load it on WAYMAX simulator?
| jrm4 wrote:
| 1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as
| opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport
| train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure.
|
| 2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It
| really feels like they're trying to bury that.
| smotched wrote:
| America is not europe, how would public transport work for the
| last 1/2miles
| goatlover wrote:
| Walking, bikes and scooters.
| airstrike wrote:
| "The Filipino driver thing" is simply that there's a manual
| override ability when this profoundly complex and marvelously
| novel technology gets trapped in edge cases.
|
| Once it gets unstuck, it runs autonomously.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Filipino driver is false. Filipino guidance person is true.
| jrm4 wrote:
| The difference being?
| hiddencost wrote:
| (2) I really don't understand why people are surprised that
| Waymo has fallbacks? The fact that they had a team ready to
| take over as necessary was well known. I've seen a bunch of
| comments about this and it seems like people are confused.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think they're surprised to learn it's being done by a bunch
| of people on the other side of the world because they don't
| want to pay American wages.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I think you sort of fundamentally misunderstand the whole
| "steak vs sizzle" thing in capitalism?
|
| The technology "feels" way less cool knowing that there are
| human backups, which would absolutely in turn make its
| percieved value go down.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will
| eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a
| robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger
| directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be
| super efficient. It will take time to get there though.
|
| But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be
| banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous
| vehicles that are very efficient drivers (we could totally
| remove stoplights, for example. Only pedestrian crossing signs
| would be needed. Robo-vehicles could plug into a city-wide
| network that optimizes the routing of every vehicle.) At that
| point, public transit becomes subsidized robotaxi rides. Why
| take a subway when a car can take you door to door with an
| optimized route?
|
| So in terms of why it isn't a waste of time, it's a step along
| the path towards this vision. We can't flip a switch and make
| this tech exist, it will happen in gradual steps.
| sagarm wrote:
| If everyone in NYC tried to commute in a single-occupancy
| vehicle, there would be gridlock -- AVs or no.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively
| used by autonomous vehicles
|
| I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it
| exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this
| point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be
| stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road
| in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo
| is amazing, but still just at the beginning of the long tail.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| Is that:
|
| - I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers
| from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today.
|
| or
|
| - I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers
| from 10% of roads...
|
| ...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I
| guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it
| happen all at once for a country. Especially a large
| country like the U.S.. More like, some really dense city
| will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only,
| and then some other cities also do years later. And then
| maybe it expands to something larger than just the core
| after 5 or 10 years. And so on...
| xnx wrote:
| > I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human
| drivers from the road in my lifetime
|
| It basically happened for horses.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Horses don't vote.
| xnx wrote:
| Neither do cars?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Drivers, however, absolutely do. And I do not see enough
| drivers voting away their own ability to drive any time
| soon.
| semiquaver wrote:
| A few years ago I would have (and did) considered the
| notion that manually programming was about to turn into a
| quaint relic and computers would be writing 90%+ of code
| preposterous. Once an alternative becomes obviously
| superior things can change very fast.
| xnx wrote:
| Right, I was pointing out that at some point there was
| probably a horse-rider constituency as there is a driver
| constituency today.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Automated taxis would still be stuck in traffic. Automation
| gets couple times in capacity, but the induced demand and
| extra cars looking for rides and parking will mean traffic.
|
| Automation makes public transit better. There will be
| automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than
| today's buses. Automation also means that buses get a virtual
| bus lane. Taxis solve the last mile problem, by taking taxi
| to the station, riding train with thousands of people, and
| then taking more transit.
|
| Also, we might discover the advantage of human powered
| transit. Ebikes are more efficient than cars and give health
| benefits. They will be much safer than automated cars. Could
| use the extra capacity for bike and bus lanes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| They are not trying to "bury" remote assistance at all. They
| wrote a white paper about it in 2020 and a blog post about it
| in 2024.
|
| Anyway you can think it's a waste but they're wasting their
| money, not yours. If you want a train in your town, go get one.
| Waymo has only spent, cumulatively, about 4 months of the
| budgets of American transit agencies. If you had all that money
| it wouldn't amount to anything.
| jrm4 wrote:
| "At all?"
|
| Oh _come on_ -- of course they are. That 's precisely why you
| put it in a "white paper" and not, you know, ads.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 2. Yes, a Waymo exec described it in a Congressional hearing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918043
| frenchy wrote:
| As someone who half-learned to drive in Manila, the idea that
| they would use Filipino drivers as backups is ironic.
|
| For context, my "driver's test" was going to the back of the
| office, and driving some old car backwards and forwards a few
| meters.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right
| way.
|
| Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent
| space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from
| there.
|
| Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you
| into the input to your driving model being vision, which means
| that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data,
| which is wasteful.
| sagarm wrote:
| The article is about using the world model to generate
| simulations, not for controlling the vehicle.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| _This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right
| way._
|
| This is legit hilarious to read from some random HN account.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Finally I understand the use case for Genie 3. All the talk about
| "you can make any videogame or movie" seems to have been pure
| distraction from real uses like this: limited, time-boxed
| simulated footage.
| fabmilo wrote:
| Very impressive work from Waymo. The driving with a tornado in
| the horizon example kind of struck my imagination, many people
| actually panic in such scenarios. I wonder though the compute
| requirements to run these simulations and producing so many data
| points.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| IIUC, there's a confusion of meaning for "World Model", between
| Waymo/Deepmind's which is something that can create a consistent
| world (for use to train Waymo's Driver), vs Yann LeCun/Advanced
| Machine Intelligence (AMI) which is something that can understand
| a world.
| xnx wrote:
| I don't think there's a conflict. If you can predict the world
| you understand it.
| joshuamerrill wrote:
| It's impressive to see simulation training for floods, tornadoes,
| and wildfires. But it's also kind of baffling that a city full of
| Waymos all seemed to fail simultaneously in San Francisco when
| the power went out on Dec 22.
|
| A power outage feels like a baseline scenario--orders of
| magnitude more common than the disasters in this demo. If the
| system can't degrade gracefully when traffic lights go dark, what
| exactly is all that simulation buying us?
| flutas wrote:
| They've also been seen driving directly into flood waters, with
| one driving through the middle of a flooded parking lot.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1pem9ep/hm...
| GoatOfAplomb wrote:
| All this simulation buys a single vehicle that drives better.
| That failure was a fleet-wide event (overloading the remote
| assistance humans).
|
| That is, both are true: this high-fidelity simulation is
| valuable and it won't catch all failure modes. Or in other
| words, it's still on Waymo for failing during the power outage,
| but it's not uniquely on Waymo's simulation team.
| t1234s wrote:
| Could these world models be used to build some sort of endless
| GranTurismo type street racing game?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It seems inevitable that they'll soon be used as the starting
| points for developing almost all video game environments.
|
| Not for the rendering (that's still way too expensive), but for
| the initial world generation that gets iteratively refined and
| then still ultimately gets converted into textured triangles.
| nightpool wrote:
| Interesting, but it feels like it's going to cope very poorly
| with actually safety-critical situations. Having a world model
| that's trained on successful driving data feels like it's going
| to "launder" a lot of implicit assumptions that would cause a car
| to get into a crash in real life (e.g. there's probably no
| examples in the training data where the car is behind a stopped
| car, and the driver pulls over to another lane and another car
| comes from behind and crashes into the driver because it didn't
| check its blindspot). These types of subtle biases are going to
| make AI-simulated world models a poor fit for training safety
| systems where failure cannot be represented in the training data,
| since they basically give models "free reign" to do anything that
| couldn't be represented in world model training.
| 420official wrote:
| You're forgetting that they are also training with real data
| from the 100+ million miles they've driven on real roads with
| riders, and using that data to train the world model AI.
|
| > there's probably no examples in the training data where the
| car is behind a stopped car, and the driver pulls over to
| another lane and another car comes from behind and crashes into
| the driver because it didn't check its blindspot
|
| This specific scenario is in the examples:
| https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/3wK6IWWc8UmhFNUSyy...
|
| It doesn't show the failure mode, it demonstrates the
| successful crash avoidance.
| MillionOClock wrote:
| While there most likely is going to be some bias in the
| training of those kinds of models, we can also hope that
| transfer learning from other non-driving videos will at least
| help generate something close enough to the very real but
| unusual situations you are mentioning. We could imagine an LLM
| serving as some kind of fuzzer to create a large variety of
| prompts for the world model, which as we can see in the article
| seems pretty capable at generating fictive scenarios when asked
| to.
|
| As always tho the devil lies in the details: is an LLM based
| generation pipeline good enough? What even is the definition of
| "good enough"? Even with good prompts will the world model
| output something sufficiently close to reality so that it can
| be used as a good virtual driving environment for further
| training / testing of autonomous cars? Or do the kind of
| limitations you mentioned still mean subtle but dangerous
| imprecisions will slip through and cause too poor data
| distribution to be a truly viable approach?
|
| My personal feeling is that this we will land somewhere in
| between: I think approaches like this one will be very useful,
| but I also don't think the current state of AI models mean we
| can have something 100% reliable with this.
|
| The question is: is 100% reliability a realistic goal? Human
| drivers are definitely not 100% reliable. If we come up with a
| solution 10x more reliable than the best human drivers, that
| maybe has some also some hard proof that it cannot have certain
| classes of catastrophic failure modes (probably with verified
| code based approaches that for instance guarantees that even if
| the NN output is invalid the car doesn't try to make moves out
| of a verifiably safe envelope) then I feel like the public and
| regulators would be much more inclined to authorize full
| autonomy.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I'd like to see Waymo have a few of their Drivers do some sim
| racing training and then compete in some live events. It wouldn't
| matter much to me if they were fast at all, I'd like to see them
| go into the rookie classes in various games and see how they
| avoid crashes from inexperienced players. I believe that it would
| be the ultimate "shitty drivers vs. AI" test.
| JBorrow wrote:
| Racing and street driving are completely different. Racing
| involves detailed knowledge of vehicle dynamics and grip.
| Street driving is mainly obstacle recognition and avoidance. No
| waymo ever operates anywhere close to the limit of grip, which
| is where you are all the time when racing.
| pcurve wrote:
| Dumb question - Why would Waymo disclose this much information to
| public and competitors?
| wnevets wrote:
| Maybe to distract from the story that they use remote drivers
| after one of their cars hit a kid? [1]
|
| [1] https://people.com/waymo-exec-reveals-company-uses-
| operators...
|
| edit: fixed kill -> hit
| docere wrote:
| The child did not die, and suffered only minor injuries:
| https://abc7.com/post/california-teamsters-call-
| suspension-w...
|
| Under the same circumstances (kid suddenly emerging between
| two parked cars and running out onto the street), it could be
| debated that the outcome could have been worse if a human
| were driving.
| dan-g wrote:
| It's awful a child was hit, but they only suffered minor
| injuries [1]. Nowhere in your linked article does it say they
| were killed.
|
| [1] https://people.com/waymo-car-hits-child-walking-to-
| school-du...
| xnx wrote:
| It's easier to build trust for such a safety-critical service
| when you're more open about how it works an performs. For the
| complete opposite approach, see Tesla.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Given the announcement from a few days ago of google trying to
| get external investment, this is their follow up, showing what
| that investment is good for. Also, it's pretty light on details
| that are of much use to competitors. "We made an accurate
| simulation system to test our system in before deployment"
| would be pretty mundane if you were talking about any other
| field of engineering.
| caycep wrote:
| All this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains
| chufucious wrote:
| Me too but given our extensive car brain culture, Waymo is an
| amazing step to getting less drivers & cars off the road, and
| to further cement future generations not ever needing to drive
| or own cars
| xnx wrote:
| Isn't a vehicle that goes from anywhere to anywhere on your own
| schedule, safely, privately, cleanly, and without billions in
| subsidies better?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't think individual vehicles can ever achieve the same
| envirnmental economies of scale as trains. Certainly they're
| far more convenient (especially for short-haul journeys) but
| I also think they're somewhat alienating, in that they're
| engineering humans out of the loop completely which
| contributes to social atomization.
| xnx wrote:
| > I don't think individual vehicles can ever achieve the
| same envirnmental economies of scale as trains.
|
| I think you'd be surprised. Look at the difference in cost
| per passenger mile.
| kidk wrote:
| Billions of subsidies? Im confused you talking about cars or
| trains.
| xnx wrote:
| No major US public transportation system is fully paid for
| by riders.
| JimmyBuckets wrote:
| That includes cars on public roads.
| semiquaver wrote:
| Yep. https://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php/Fa
| rebox_Re... is a sobering reminder that many cities'
| public transportation would cost $20-50 per trip if paid
| entirely by riders and thus could not exist without
| subsidy.
| caycep wrote:
| NYC congestion pricing seems to be working quite well
| though, and probably helps offset MTA costs.
| xnx wrote:
| NYC "congestion" pricing (actually cordon pricing) is a
| good idea. Would be great to see more road use fees
| proportional to use (distance, weight^3, etc.).
| g947o wrote:
| Not necessarily, and your premise is incorrect.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Trains only require subsidies in a world where human & robot
| cars are subsidized.
|
| As soon as a mode of transport actually has to compete in a
| market for scarce & valuable land to operate on, trains and
| other forms of transit (publicly or privately owned) win
| every time.
| kentiko wrote:
| Cars don't work in dense places.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >without billions in subsidies
|
| Is there a magic road wand?
| andoando wrote:
| Ski lifts man, ski lifts all over the city
| underdeserver wrote:
| What a glorious utopia we could have
| bryan_w wrote:
| > Ski lifts man, ski lifts all over the city
|
| Don't they have those somewhere in South America?
| scoofy wrote:
| As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains,
| and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they
| (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of
| operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3)
| don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of
| breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative
| synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment of the
| potential ridership away from these systems.
|
| So many people advocate for public transit, but are unwilling
| to deal with the current market tradeoffs and decisions people
| are making on the ground. As long as that keeps happening,
| expect modes of transit -- _like Waymo_ -- that deliver the
| level of service that they promise to keep exceeding
| expectations.
|
| I've spent my entire adult life advocating for transportation
| alternatives, and at every turn in America, the vast majority
| of other transit advocates just expect people to be okay with
| anti-social behavior going completely unenforced, and expecting
| "good citizens" to keep paying when the expected value for any
| rational person is to engage in freeloading. Then they point to
| "enforcing the fare box" as a tradeoff between money to collect
| vs cost of enforcement, when the actually tradeoff is the
| signalling to every anti-social actor in the system that they
| can do whatever they want without any consequences.
|
| I currently only see a future in bike-share, because it's the
| only system that actually delivers on what it promises.
| caycep wrote:
| Well then invest in those things, then. It would probably
| cost less than the amount they're spending to make a Waymo
| World Model.
| scoofy wrote:
| Lighting money on fire by funding an extremely expensive
| system that _most people don 't want to use_ is not an
| "investment." It's just a good way to make everyone much
| poorer and worse off than if we'd done nothing. The only
| way to change things is to convince the electorate that we
| actually do need rules and enforcement and _a sustainable
| transportation system_.
|
| This isn't just happening in America. Train systems are in
| rough shape in the UK and Germany too.
|
| Ebike shares are a much more sustainable system with a much
| lower cost, and achieve about 90% of the level of service
| in temperate regions of the country. Even the ski-lift guy
| in this thread has a much more reasonable approach to
| public transit, because they actually have extremely low
| cost for the level of service they provide. Their only real
| shortcoming is they they don't handle peak demand well, and
| are not flexible enough to handle their own success.
| caycep wrote:
| People want to use it everywhere in the world
| scoofy wrote:
| People _want_ to have their cake and eat it too.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| > they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable
| cost of operations
|
| Why do you expect them to make money? Roads don't make money
| and no one thinks to complain about that. One of the purposes
| of government is to make investment in things that have more
| nebulous returns. Moving more people to public transit makes
| better cities, healthier and happier citizens, stronger
| communities, and lets us save money on road infrastructure.
| scoofy wrote:
| >Why do you expect them to make money?
|
| I don't.
|
| That's why I said "variable cost of operations."
|
| If a system doesn't generate enough revenue to cover the
| variable costs of operation, then _every single new
| passenger_ drives the system closer to bankruptcy. The more
| "successful" the system is -- the more people _depend_ on
| it -- the _more likely it is to fail_ if anything happens
| to the underlying funding source, like a regular old local
| recession. This simple policy decision can create a
| downward economic spiral when a recession leads to service
| cuts, which leads to people unable to get to work reliably,
| which creates more economic pain, which leads to a bigger
| recession... rinse /repeat. This is why a public transit
| system should cover _variable costs_ so that a successful
| system can grow -- _and shrink_ -- sustainably.
|
| When you aren't growing sustainably, you open yourself up
| to the whims of the business cycle literally destroying
| your transit system. It's literally happening right now
| with SF MUNI, where we've had so many funding problems,
| that they've consolidated bus lines. I use the 38R, and
| it's become extremely busy. These busses are getting so
| packed that people don't want to use them, but the point is
| _they can 't expand service because each expansion loses
| them more money_, again, because the system doesn't
| actually cover those variable costs.
|
| The public should be 100% completely covering the _fixed_
| capital costs of the system. Ideally, while there is a bit
| of wiggle room, the ridership should be 100% be covering
| the _variable_ capital costs. That way the system can
| expand when it 's successful, and contract when it's less
| popular. Right now in the Bay Area, you have the worst of
| both worlds, you have an _underutilized_ system with
| absolutely _spiraling_ costs, simply because there is zero
| connection between "people actually wanting to use the
| system" and "where the money comes from."
| caycep wrote:
| Maybe not BART but the new Caltrain electrification program
| seems to be a success and ridership and revenue are up
| martinald wrote:
| You're definitely right on (2) and (3). I've used many
| transit systems across the world (including TransMilenio in
| Bogota and other latam countries "renowned" for crime) and I
| have never felt as unsafe as I have using transit in the
| SFBA. Even standing at bus stops draws a lot of attention
| from people suffering with serious addiction/mental health
| problems.
|
| 1) is a bit simplistic though. I don't know of any European
| system that would cover even operating costs out of
| fare/commercial revenue. Potentially the London Underground -
| but not London buses. UK National Rail had higher success
| rates
|
| The better way to look at it imo is looking at the economic
| loss as well of congestion/abandoned commutes. To do a
| ridiculous hypothetical, London would collapse entirely if it
| didn't have transit. Perhaps 30-40% of inner london could
| commute by car (or walk/bike), so the economic benefit of
| that variable transit cost is in the hundreds of billions a
| year (compared to a small subsidy).
|
| It's not the same in SFBA so I guess it's far easier to just
| "write off" transit like that, it is theoretically possible
| (though you'd probably get some quite extreme additional
| congestion on the freeways as even that small % moving to
| cars would have an outsized impact on additional congestion).
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Trains need well behaved people, otherwise they are shit.
|
| I don't want to hear tiktok or full volume soap operas blasting
| at some deaf mouth breather.
|
| I don't want to be near loud chewing of smelly leftovers.
|
| I don't want to be begged for money, or interact with high or
| psychotic people.
|
| The current culture doesn't allow enforcement of social
| behaviour: so public transport will always be a miserable
| containment vessel for the least functional, and everyone with
| sense avoids the whole thing.
| neysofu wrote:
| > some deaf mouth breather
|
| I quite agree with the overall point but can we leave this
| kind of discourse on X, please? It doesn't add much, it just
| feels caustic for effect and engagement farming.
| raincole wrote:
| Roads (cars) need well behave people too. The only way cars
| filter some of the out is by the price.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I think future generations will resent us for bureaucratizing
| our way out of the California HSR.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| What if we put this mechanism of recording the world on people.
| We have mics listening to people talking to us and noises we
| hear.
|
| Also we record body position actuation and self speech. As output
| then we put this on thousands of people to get as much data as
| Waymo gets.
|
| I mean that's what we need to imitate agi right? I guess the only
| thing missing is the memory mechanism. We train everything as if
| it's an input and output function without accounting for memory.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Seems relevant: Waymo exec admits remote operators in Philippines
| help guide US Robotaxis
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918043
| KeyBoardG wrote:
| and I literally just saw the other headline "Waymo says its
| robotaxis get help from remote workers in the Philippines"
| cratermoon wrote:
| Meanwhile. https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymo-exec-admits-
| remote-...
| yummypaint wrote:
| _By leveraging Genie's immense world knowledge, it can simulate
| exceedingly rare events--from a tornado to a casual encounter
| with an elephant--that are almost impossible to capture at scale
| in reality. The model's architecture offers high controllability,
| allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language
| prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo
| World Model generates high-fidelity, multi-sensor outputs that
| include both camera and lidar data._
|
| How do you know the generated outputs are correct? Especially for
| unusual circumstances?
|
| Say the scenario is a patch of road is densely covered with 5 mm
| ball bearings. I'm sure the model will happily spit out numbers,
| but are they reasonable? How do we know they are reasonable? Even
| if the prediction is ok, how do we fundamentally know that the
| prediction for 4 mm ball bearings won't be completely wrong?
|
| There seems to be a lot of critical information missing.
| aaaalone wrote:
| They probably just look at the results of the generation.
|
| I mean would I like a in-depth tour of this? Yes.
|
| But it's a marketing blog article, what do you expect?
| parliament32 wrote:
| > just look at the results of the generation
|
| And? The entire hallucination problem with text generators is
| "plausible sounding yet incorrect", so how does a human
| eyeballing it help at all?
| inkysigma wrote:
| I think because here there's no single correct answer that
| the model is allowed to be fuzzier. You still mix in real
| training data and maybe more physics based simulation of
| course but it does seem acceptable that you synthesize
| extremely tail evaluations since there isn't really a
| "better" way by definition and you can evaluate the end
| driving behavior after training.
|
| You can also probably still use it for some kinds of
| evaluation as well since you can detect if two point clouds
| intersect presumably.
|
| In much a similar way that LLMs are not perfect at
| translation but are widely used anyway for NMT.
| fooker wrote:
| > from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant
|
| A sims style game with this technology will be pretty nice!
| joshfee wrote:
| Isn't that true for any scenario previously unencountered,
| whether it is a digital simulation or a human? We can't
| optimize for the best possible outcome in reality (since we
| can't predict the future), but we can optimize for making the
| best decisions given our knowledge of the world (even if it is
| imperfect).
|
| In other words it is a gradient from "my current prediction" to
| "best prediction given my imperfect knowledge" to "best
| prediction with perfect knowledge", and you can improve the
| outcome by shrinking the gap between 1&2 or shrinking the gap
| between 2&3 (or both)
| ses1984 wrote:
| You could train it in simulation and then test it in reality.
| inkysigma wrote:
| Would it actually be a good idea to operate a car near an
| active tornado?
| IMTDb wrote:
| The idea is that, over time, the quality and accuracy of world-
| model outputs will improve. That, in turn, lets autonomous
| driving systems train on a large amount of "realistic enough"
| synthetic data.
|
| For example, we know from experience that Waymo is currently
| good enough to drive in San Francisco. We don't yet trust it in
| more complex environments like dense European cities or
| Southeast Asian "hell roads." Running the stack against world
| models can give a big head start in understanding what works,
| and which situations are harder, without putting any humans in
| harm's way.
|
| We don't need perfect accuracy from the world model to get real
| value. And, as usual, the more we use and validate these
| models, the more we can improve them; creating a virtuous
| cycle.
| joshfee wrote:
| It is great being able to generate a much larger universe of
| possibilities than what they can gather from real world data
| collection, but I'd be curious to learn how they check that the
| generated data is a superset of the possibility-space seen in the
| real world (e.g. confirm that their models closely match what is
| seen in the real world too)
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Have been seeing Waymo test vehicles regularly around central
| London recently, operating at speed.
|
| For shits and giggles, I did stop randomly while crossing the
| road and acted like a jerk.
|
| The Waymo did, in fact, stop.
|
| Kudos, Waymo
| 0xTJ wrote:
| Interesting, but I am very sceptical. I'd be interested in seeing
| actual verified results of how it handles a road with heavy snow,
| where the only lane references are the wheel tracks of other
| vehicles, and you can't tell where the road ends and the snow-
| filled ditch begins.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Do wayno models really use side cameras at only like 4 FPS?
| SebastianSosa wrote:
| Very concerned with this direction of training "counterfactual
| events such as whether the Waymo Driver could have safely driven
| more confidently instead of yielding in a particular situation."
| Seems dicey. This could lead in the direction to a less safe
| Waymo. Since the counterfactual will be generated, I suspect that
| that the generations will be biased towards survivor situations
| where most video footage in its training data will be from
| environments where people reacted well not those that ended in
| tragedy. Emboldening Waymo on generated best case data. THIS IS
| DANGEROUS!!!
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(page generated 2026-02-06 23:00 UTC)