[HN Gopher] The Waymo World Model
___________________________________________________________________
The Waymo World Model
Author : xnx
Score : 1107 points
Date : 2026-02-06 16:20 UTC (1 days 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.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| The goal is not to drive in all conditions; it is to drive
| in all drivable conditions. Human eyeballs also cannot see
| through dense fog clouds. Operating in these environments
| is extra credit with marginal utility in real life.
| fcantournet wrote:
| But humans react to this extremely differently than a
| self driving car. Humans take responsability, and the
| self-driving disengages and say : WELP. Oh sorry were you
| "enjoying your travel time to do something useful" as we
| very explicitely marketed ? Well now your wife is dead
| and it's your fault (legally). Kisses, Elon.
| 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.
| disillusioned wrote:
| Easiest example I always give of this is pulling out of
| the alley behind my house: there is a large bush that
| occludes my view left to oncoming traffic, badly. I do
| what every human does:
|
| 1. Crane my neck forward, see if I can see around it.
|
| 2. Inch forward a bit more, keep craning my neck.
|
| 3. Recognize, no, I'm still occluded.
|
| 4. Count on the heuristic analysis of the light filtering
| through the bush and determine if the change in light is
| likely movement associated with an oncoming car.
|
| My Tesla's perpendicular camera is... mounted behind my
| head on the B-pillar... fixed... and sure as hell can't
| read the tea leaves, so to speak, to determine if that
| slight shadow change increases the likelihood that a car
| is about to hit us.
|
| I honestly don't trust it to pull out of the alley. I
| don't know how I can. I'd basically have to be nose-into-
| right-lane for it to be far enough ahead to see
| conclusively.
|
| Waymo can beam the LIDAR above and around the bush, owing
| to its height and the distance it can receive from, and
| its camera coverage to the perpendicular is far better.
| Vision only misses so many weird edge cases, and I hate
| that Elon just keeps saying "well, humans have only TWO
| cameras and THEY drive fine every day! h'yuck!"
| 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?
| FrojoS wrote:
| In fact there are even more depth perception clues. Maybe
| the most obvious is size (retinal versus assumed real world
| size). Further examples include motion parallax, linear
| perspective, occlusion, shadows, and light gradients
|
| Here is a study on how these effects rank when it's comes
| to (hand) reaching tasks in VR:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29293512/
| 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.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The width of your own vehicle is (pretty much) a
| constant, and trivial to know. Ford F150 is ~79.9 inches.
| Done. No sensors needed.
|
| All the shit out there in the world is another story.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| You misundestood the assignment.
|
| Write a sonnet about Elon musk.
| acomjean wrote:
| Humans are very good at processing the images that come
| into our brain. Each eye has a "blind spot" but we don't
| notice. Our eyes adjust color (fluorescent lights are
| weird) and the amount of light coming in. When we look
| through a screen door or rain and just ignore it, or if
| you look outside a moving vehicle to the side you can
| ignore the foreground.
|
| If you increase the distance of stereo cameras you
| probably can increase depth perception.
|
| But a lidar or radar sensor is just sensing distance.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Radar has a cool property that it can sense the relative
| velocity of objects along the beam axis too, from Doppler
| frequency shifting. It's one sense that cars have that
| humans don't.
| disillusioned wrote:
| To this point, one of the coolest features Teslas _used_
| to have was the ability for it to determine and integrate
| the speed of the car in front of you AND the speed of the
| car in front of THAT car, even if the second car was
| entirely visually occluded. They did this by bouncing the
| radar beam under the car in front and determining that
| there were multiple targets. It could even act on this: I
| had my car AEB when the second ahead car slammed on THEIR
| brakes before the car ahead even reacted. Absolutely
| wild. Completely gone in vision-only.
| chippiewill wrote:
| The company I used to work for was developing a self
| driving car with stereo depth on a wide baseline.
|
| It's not all sunshine and roses to be honest - it was one
| of the weakest links in the perception system. The video
| had to run at way higher resolutions than it would
| otherwise and it was incredibly sensitive to calibration
| accuracy.
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| Surely as soon as they're safer than humans they should be
| deployed as fast as possible to save some of the 3000 people
| who are killed by human drivers every day
| cman1444 wrote:
| Of course they should be, but that's not what will happen.
| Humans are not rational, so self-driving cars must be
| significantly safer than human drivers to avoid as much
| political pushback as possible.
| 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"?
| drysine wrote:
| >in a respectful way
|
| The irony
| 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.
| drnick1 wrote:
| I think it just means "once powerful and important, but now
| practically irrelevant." England is a better example
| though.
| 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!!
| 8note wrote:
| this sounds like a major benefit.
|
| i dont want my uber driver bragging anout how theyre going to
| shoot me before i get out of the car
| bdangubic wrote:
| what did all the farmers do when the first tractors rolled into
| the fields?
| mavhc wrote:
| They invented offices because the massive increase in
| productivity required more organisation than "I'll take it
| all to the market on Saturday"
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What's your theory for how it works?
| 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.
| tamimio wrote:
| Yeah I have some videos of these drivers in action, I think the
| sensors are as assistance and but not the whole story, so yeah
| there's models lidars etc etc but human factor is there,
| unfortunately this means we should see soon many cobitics are
| teleopetated remotely from India and Philippines and the likes
| to satisfy the greed of these companies to pay peanuts to
| operate them.
| 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.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I live in London. Most residential streets are two-way but
| there is only space for one car, and driving on the curb is
| not really an option.
|
| The trick to UK streets is that parking actually happens on
| the street itself, and when driving you must find a spot
| when people are not parking to make way for people coming
| the other way.
| 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
| seanhunter wrote:
| Yeah it's interesting to imagine a London that had such a
| rebuild, like Napoleon's rebuild of Paris. I personally
| love the weird narrow streets and little alleyways of the
| City, but that's because when I'm there I'm pretty much
| exclusively on foot having taken the tube in.
| 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
| anupamchugh wrote:
| This is the real story buried under the simulation angle. If
| you can generate reliable 3D LiDAR from 2D video, every dashcam
| on earth becomes training data. Every YouTube driving video,
| every GoPro clip, every security camera feed.
|
| Waymo's fleet is ~700 cars. The internet has millions of hours
| of driving footage. This technique turns the entire internet
| into a sensor suite. That's a bigger deal than the simulation
| itself.
| 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Have you ever seen a cop trying to pull over a Waymo? It
| isn't going well.
| 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.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I didn't mean to insult the original poster. But I have
| seen people who think that waymos are being driven
| remotely by filipinos
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, I would take a robot to handle all of my housework.
|
| Purpose built, that probably takes the form of a humanoid
| robot since all of tasks it needs to do were previously
| designed for humanoids.
| rswail wrote:
| Vacuuming and mopping are not inherently "designed" for
| humans.
|
| Dusting with a single extensible and multiple degrees of
| freedom arm would be much more maneuverable than a human
| arm.
|
| Loading and unloading washing machines or dryers or doign
| the same for dishes and cutlery in a dishwasher is not
| inherently designed for humans.
|
| If anything, selling an integrated "housekeeping" system
| that fits into an existing laundry and combines features
| would be a much better approach.
| dham wrote:
| It's called a dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer. Plus
| like robomowers, vaccums etc.
| Fricken wrote:
| It's so they can stick a Tesla logo on a bunch of chinese
| tech and call it innovation.
| rswail wrote:
| The drop in demand for Tesla's clapped out model range would
| have meant embarrassing factory closures, so now they're
| being closed to start manufacturing a completely different
| product. Bait and switch for Tesla investors.
|
| I wonder how long they'll be closed for "modifications" and
| whether the Optimus Prime robot factories will go into
| production before the "Trump Kennedy Center" is reopened
| after its "renovations".
| 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
| Mawr wrote:
| Interesting, got any links? Sounds completely
| unbelievable, eyes are far superior to the shitty cameras
| Tesla has on their cars.
| jellojello wrote:
| Yea.. not holding my breath on links to superman tesla
| cameras performing better than eyes
| dham wrote:
| There's a misconception that what people see and what the
| camera sees is similar. Not true at all. One day when
| it's raining or foggy, have some record the driving,
| through the windshield. You'll be very surprised. Even
| what the camera displays on the screen isn't what it's
| actually "seeing".
| 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.
| quanto wrote:
| What are the techniques (and the papers thereof) that you
| consider to be spectacularly good before 2021 for depth
| estimation, monocular or not?
|
| I do some tangent work from this field for applications
| in robotics, and I would consider (metric) depth
| estimation (and 3D reconstruction) starting to be solved
| only by 2025 thanks to a few select labs.
|
| Car vision has some domain specificity (high similarity
| images from adjacent timestamps, relatively simpler
| priors, etc) that helps, indeed.
| rswail wrote:
| It doesn't solve the "Coyote paints tunnel on rock"
| problem though.
| rkomorn wrote:
| IIRC, that was only ever a problem for the coyote,
| though.
|
| Source: not a computer vision engineer, but a childhood
| consumer of looney toons cartoons.
| rswail wrote:
| Time for a car company to call itself "ACME" and the
| first model the "Road Runner".
| 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
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Tesla sales are dead across the world. Cybertruck is a
| failure. Chinese EVs are demonstrably better.
|
| No one wants these crappy cars anymore.
| 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.
| dham wrote:
| Good ole Autopilot vs FSD post. You would think people on
| Hacker News would be better informed. Autopilot is just
| lane keep and adaptive cruise control. Basically what
| every other car has at this point.
|
| "MacOS Tahoe has these cool features". "Yea but what
| about this wikipedia article on System 1. Look it has
| these issues."
|
| That's how you come across
| 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.
| socialcommenter wrote:
| How many of the 70 human accidents would be adequately
| explained by controlling for speed, alcohol, wanton
| inattention, etc? (The first two alone reduce it by 70%)
|
| No customer would turn on FSD on an icy road, or on
| country lanes in the UK which are one lane but run in
| both directions; it's much harder to have a passenger
| fatality in stop-start traffic jams in downtown US
| cities.
|
| Even if those numbers are genuine (2 vs 70) I wouldn't
| consider it apples-for-apples.
|
| Public information campaigns and proper policing have a
| role to play in car safety, if that's the stated goal we
| don't necessarily need to sink billions into researching
| self driving
| 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.
| dham wrote:
| Lidar is a moot point. You can't drive with just Lidar,
| no matter what. That's what people don't understand. The
| most common one I hear: "What if the camera gets mud on
| it", ok then you have to get out and clean it, or it
| needs an auto cleaning system.
| 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!
| iknowstuff wrote:
| They had radar too. No such incidents since going camera
| only fyi, even on the old autopilot product
| 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)!
| red75prime wrote:
| > Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem
| of "Always Available and Safe"
|
| And it's still not clear whether they are using a
| fallback driving stack for a situation where one of non-
| essential (i.e. non-camera (1)) sensors is degraded. I
| haven't seen Waymo clearly stating capabilities of their
| self-driving stack in this regard. On the other hand,
| there are such things as washer fluid and high dynamic
| range cameras.
|
| (1) You can't drive in a city if you can't see the light
| emitted by traffic lights, which neither lidar nor radar
| can do.
| jellojello wrote:
| Hence why both together make the solution waymo chose.
| The proof is in the pudding, Waymo's have been driving
| millions of miles without any intervention. Tesla
| requires safety drivers. I would never trust the FSD on
| my model 3 to be even nearly perfect all the time.
|
| Lidar also gives you the ability to see through fog and
| as it scans, see the depth needed to nearly always
| understand what object is in front of them.
|
| My Model 3 shows "degraded" or "unavailable" about 2% of
| the time i'm driving around populated areas. Zero chance
| it will ever be truly FSD capable, no matter the software
| improvements. It'll still be unavailable because the
| cameras are blinded/blocked/unable to process the scene
| because it can't see the scene.
|
| While you're right, washer fluid works usually on the
| windshield, it doesn't on the side cameras, and yea hdr
| could improve things, it won't improve depth perception,
| and this will never be installed on my model 3..
|
| Lidar contributes the data most needed to handle the
| millions of edge cases that exist. With both camera and
| lidar contributing the data they are both the best at
| collecting, the risk of the very worst type of accidents
| is greatly reduced.
|
| I don't see these stats https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
| happening for tesla anytime soon.
| red75prime wrote:
| > without any intervention
|
| but with occasional remote guidance (Waymo doesn't seem
| to disclose statistics of that). In some cases remote
| guidance includes placing waypoints[1].
|
| > Lidar also gives you the ability to see through fog and
| as it scans
|
| Nah. Lidar isn't much better in fog than cameras. If I'm
| not mistaken, fog, rain, smoke, snow scatter IR light
| approximately the same as visible light. The lidar beam
| needs to travel twice the distance and its power is
| limited by eye-safety concerns.
|
| > FSD on my model 3 to be even nearly perfect all the
| time
|
| It doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to not hit
| things, cars and pedestrians too hard and too often,
| while mostly obeying traffic rules. Waymo has quite a few
| complains about their cars' behavior[2], but they manage
| just fine.
|
| [1] third video in https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-
| response
|
| [2] https://www.austintexas.gov/page/autonomous-vehicles
| mavhc wrote:
| Waymo also had safety drivers for years.
|
| All you really need is "drive slower if you can't see
| (because rain, fog, or degraded cameras), or you're in an
| area where children might run out into the road"
| dham wrote:
| Waymo had safety drivers for a long time. And still have
| safety drivers to this day when they roll out a new city.
| You wouldn't have known that because no one was paying
| attention to this stuff back then.
| dham wrote:
| If you have mud on a camera, you can't drive it either
| way. Lidar or not. The way to actually solve these issues
| is to have way more cameras for redundancy / self
| cleaning etc, not other sensors.
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Years ago he called lidar a crutch...
|
| And I agree, it is. Clearly it is theoretically possible
| without.
|
| But when you can't walk at all, a crutch might be just
| what you need to get going before you can do it without
| the crutch!
| mr_toad wrote:
| > The cost is not even that significant compared to the
| overall cost of a Tesla.
|
| That's true now, but when they first debuted they would
| have doubled the cost of the car.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| When Tesla debuted, the cost of batteries made electric
| cars more like an expensive novelty. The Tesla roadster
| certainly was fun, but it wasn't a practical car for day-
| to-day use.
|
| Of course, things have changed.
|
| Had Tesla gone all-in on Lidar, they could have turned
| the technology into a commodity, they are a trillion
| dollar company producing a million cars a year. Lidar is
| already present on cheap robot vacuum cleaners, and we
| have time-of-flight cameras in smartphones, I don't
| believe it would have been a problem to equip $50k cars
| with Lidar.
| rcpt wrote:
| > purely aesthetic reasons
|
| This is huge though.
|
| People aren't setting them on fire during protests, and
| if an FSD Tesla plows into a farmers market, it might not
| even make the news.
|
| People hate tech so much that self-driving companies with
| easy-to-spot cars have had to shut down after just a few
| mistakes.
|
| Disguising Teslas as plain old regular human-driven cars
| is a great idea and I wouldn't be surprised if they win
| the market because of this. Even if they suck at driving.
| codeka wrote:
| People aren't setting Teslas on fire? Where do you get
| that from?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/05/01/tesla
| -pr...
| 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.
| dham wrote:
| If the camera is covered or blocked, you can't drive
| plain and simple, as you can't drive a car (at least on
| Earth) with just Lidar. The roads are made for eyes.
| Maybe on Rocky's homeworld you can have a Lidar only
| system for traveling.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| FSD14 on hw4 does not. Its dynamic range is equivalent or
| better than human.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| This will considerably skew the statistics, a low sun
| dramatically increases accident rates on humans too.
| 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
| jellojello wrote:
| waymo just hit it's first pedestrian, ever. It did it at
| a speed of 6mph and it was estimated a human would have
| hit the kid at 14mph (it was going 17mph when a small
| child jumped out in front of it from behind a black suv.
|
| First pedestrian struck. That's crazy.
|
| Tesla just disengages fsd anytime a sensor is slightly
| blocked/covered/blinded.. waymo out here doing fsd 100%
| of the time and basically never hurts anyone.
|
| I don't get the tesla/elon love here, i like my model 3
| but it's never going to get real fsd, and that sucks,
| elon also lies about the roadmap, timing, etc. I bet the
| roadster is canceled now. Why do people like inferior
| sensors and autistic hitler?
| johnthewise wrote:
| Waymos disengage and get tele operated too?
| kube-system wrote:
| Not really. Waymos can't be driven remotely, their remote
| operators can give the car directions, e.g. "use this
| lane", and then the autonomous system controls the
| vehicle to execute those directions.
|
| I'm sure latency and connectivity is too much of an risk
| to do it any other way.
|
| The only Waymos driven by a human are the ones with human
| drivers physically in the car
| 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.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| What causes LiDAR to fail harder than normal cameras in
| bad weather conditions? I understand that normal LiDAR
| algorithms assume the direct paths from light source to
| object to camera pixel, while a mist will scatter part of
| the light, but it would seem like this can be addressed
| in the pixel depth estimation algorithm that combines the
| complex amplitudes at the different LiDAR frequencies.
|
| I understand that small lens sizes mean that falling
| droplets can obstruct the view behind the droplet, while
| larger lens sizes can more easily see beyond the droplet.
|
| I seldom see discussion of the exact failure modes for
| specific weather conditions. Even if larger lenses are
| selected the light source should use similar lens
| dimensions. Independent modulation of multiple light
| sources could also dramatically increase the gained
| information from each single LiDAR sensor.
|
| Do self-driving camera systems (conventional and LiDAR)
| use variable or fixed tilt lenses? Normal camera systems
| have the focal plane perpendicular to the viewing
| direction, but for roads it _might_ be more interesting
| to have a large swath of the horizontal road in focus. At
| least having 1 front facing camera with a horizontal road
| in focus may prove highly beneficial.
|
| To a certain extend an FSD system predicts the best
| course of action. When different courses of action have
| similar logits of expected fitness for the next best
| course of action, we can speak of doubt. With RMAD we can
| figure out which features or what facets of input or
| which part of the view is causing the doubt.
|
| A camera has motion blur (unless you can strobe the
| illumination source, but in daytime the sun is very hard
| to outshine), it would seem like an interesting
| experiment to:
|
| 1. identify in real time which doubts have the most
| significant influence on the determination of best course
| of action
|
| 2. have a camera that can track an object to eliminate
| motion blur but still enjoy optimal lighting (under the
| sun, or at night), just like our eyes can rotate
|
| 3. rerun the best course of action prediction and feed
| back this information to the company, so it can figure
| out the cost-benefit of adding a free tracking camera
| dedicated to eliminating doubts caused by motion blur.
| 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.
| jeron wrote:
| maybe it's better to say it was the biggest L of his
| engineering career instead of his political career
| 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:
| Software is pretty solid as of latest release. EX90 is a
| sleeper pick now because of the bad press being behind
| the latest software.
| 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.
| boredtofears wrote:
| What problem is it even solving? Keeping my car straight
| so I can be less attentive on the road?
|
| I get it in the context of driverless but find it nothing
| but annoying as a driver.
| kube-system wrote:
| Lane keep keeps your car in the lane so you can stop
| paying attention just like cruise control keeps you going
| the same speed so you can stop paying attention... they
| don't.
|
| They are just aids that ease fatigue on long trips.
| dham wrote:
| Lane keep is absolutely not a solved problem. Go test
| drive any of the latest cars from Kia, Honda, Toyota,
| Hyundai, Ford, etc. They all will literally kill you.
| 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.
| schiffern wrote:
| "More video" (gigabytes) is a straw man.
|
| The key metric is more _unusual situations_. That scales
| with miles driven, not gigabytes. With onboard inference
| the car simply logs anything 'unusual' (low confidence) to
| selectively upload those needle-in-a-haystack rare events.
| 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.
| ody4242 wrote:
| Yesterday GPT 5.2 wrote a python function for me that had the
| import in the middle of the code, for no reason. (It was a
| simple import of requests module in a REST client...) Claude
| I agree is a lot better for backend,Gemini is very good for
| frontend
| 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
| bagels wrote:
| ChatGPT really innovated on making the chat not say
| racist things that the press could report on. Other
| efforts before this failed for that reason.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Right. The problem was that people under appreciated
| 'alignment' even before the models were big. And as they
| get bigger and smarter it becomes more of an issue.
| olalonde wrote:
| It was a surprise to OpenAI too. ChatGPT was essentially a
| demo app to showcase their API, it was not meant to be a
| mass consumer product. When you think about it, ChatGPT is
| a pretty awkward product name, but they had to stick with
| it.
| 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.
| belter wrote:
| He was shopping for other strokes from Google employees:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/alleged-
| affair-...
| 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.
| redanddead wrote:
| What'd he say
| refulgentis wrote:
| That the rocket company should buy an LLM
| AYBABTME wrote:
| the rebuke is that lack of chaos makes people feel more
| orderly and as if things are going better, but it doesn't
| increase your luck surface area, it just maximizes cozy
| vibes and self interested comfort.
| refulgentis wrote:
| My dynamic range of professional experience is high,
| dropout => waiter => found startup => acquirer => Google.
|
| You're making an interesting point that I somewhat agree
| with from the perspective of someone was...clearly a
| little more feral than his surroundings in Google, and
| wildly succeeded and ultimately quietly failed because of
| it.
|
| The important bit is "great man" theory doesn't solve
| lack of dynamism. It usually makes things worse. The
| people you read about in newspapers are pretty much as
| smart as you, for better or worse.
|
| I actually disagreed with the Sergey thing along the same
| lines, it was being used as a parable for why it was okay
| to do ~nothing in year 3 and continue avoiding what we
| were supposed to ship in year 1, because only VPs outside
| my org and the design section in my org would care.
|
| Not sure if all that rhymes or will make any sense to you
| at all. But I deeply respect the point you are
| communicating, and also mean to communicate that there's
| another just as strong lesson: _one person_ isn 't bright
| enough to pull that off, and the important bit there
| isn't "oh, he isn't special", it's that it makes you even
| _more_ careful building organizations that maintain
| dynamism and creativity.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Yeah people seem to be pretty poor at judging the impact
| of 'key' people.
|
| E.g. Steve Jobs was absolutely fundamental to the turn
| around of Apple. Will Brin have this level of incremental
| impact on the Goog/Alphabet of today? Nah.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| The difference is: Apple had one "key person", Jobs, and
| yes the products he drove made the company successful.
| Now Jobs has gone I haven't seen anything new.
|
| But if you look at Google, there isn't one key product.
| There are a whole pile of products that are best in
| class. Search (cringe, I know it's popular here to say
| Google search sucks and perhaps it does, but what search
| engine is far better?), YouTube, Maps, Android, Waymo,
| GMail, Deep Mind, the cloud infrastructure, translate,
| lens (OCR) and probably a lot of others I've forgotten.
| Don't forget Sheets and Docs, which while they have been
| replicated by Microsoft and others now were first done by
| Google. Some of them, like Maps, seem to have swapped
| entire teams - yet continued to be best in class.
| Predicting Google won't be at the forefront on the next
| advance seems perilous.
|
| Maybe these products have key people as you call them,
| but the magic in Alphabet doesn't seem to be them. The
| magic seems to be Alphabet has some way to create /
| acquire these keep people. Or perhaps Alphabet just knows
| how to create top engineering teams that keep rolling
| along, even when the team members are replaced.
|
| Apple produced one key person, Jobs. Alphabet seems to be
| a factory creating lots of key people moving products
| along. But as Google even manages to replace these key
| people (as they did for Maps) and still keep the product
| moving, I'm not sure they are the key to Googles success.
| felixg3 wrote:
| Docs was just an acquisition of Writely, an early ,,Web
| 2.0" document editor service, so ,,first done by google"
| is a bit imprecise
| dietr1ch wrote:
| In Assistant having higher-ups spitting ideas and random
| thoughts ended up in people mistakenly assume that we
| really wanted to go/do that, meaning that chaos resulted
| in ill and cancelled projects.
|
| The worst part was figuring what happened way too late.
| People were having trying to go for promo for a project
| that didn't launch. Many people got angry, some left, the
| product felt stale and leadership&management lost trust.
| alwa wrote:
| Isn't that what the parent is describing? "Ill and
| cancelled projects" <==> "luck surface area", and "trying
| to go for promotion" <==> "cozy vibes and self-interested
| comfort"?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'm in a similar position and generally agree with your
| take, but the plus side to his involvement is if he
| believed in your project or viewpoint he would act as the
| ultimate red tape cutter.
| refulgentis wrote:
| And there is absolutely nothing more valuable at G (no
| snark)
|
| (cheers, don't read too much signal into my thoughts,
| it's more negative than I'd intend. Just was aware it was
| someone going off PR, and doing hero worship that I
| myself used to do, and was disabused over 7 years there,
| and would like other people outside to disabuse
| themselves of. It's _a_ place, not _the_ place)
| 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.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm convinced my last groan will be reading a thread
| about Google paper clipping the world, and someone will
| be moaning about Google Reader.
| tbossanova wrote:
| "A more elegant weapon of a civilised age."
| refulgentis wrote:
| Lol, it seems obvious in retrospect, there really,
| really, needs to be.
|
| Therefore we now have "Vinkel's Law"
| wisty wrote:
| It's far from the only example
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| 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?
| theptip wrote:
| Right. Reader was not a case of apathy and failure to see
| the product's value.
|
| It was Google clearly seeing the product's value, and
| killing it because that value was detrimental to their
| ads business.
| largbae wrote:
| Can you not vibe code it back into existence yet?
| belter wrote:
| Because after the death of Epstein he suddenly had a lot
| of free time?
|
| https://www.wsj.com/finance/jeffrey-epstein-advised-
| sergey-b...
|
| https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2017428928814588323
| rvnx wrote:
| If this is true, this is disappointing :/
|
| On a similar topic, it is worth mentioning the
| entrepreneurs that are forced into sex (or let's say,
| very pushed) by VCs.
|
| For those who feel safe or taking it as a joke, this
| affects women AND men.
|
| Some people are going to be disappointed about their
| heroes.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Dont mention the recent Eric Schmidt scandal.
|
| Barely any of these jokers are clean. Makes MZ look
| seemingly normal in comparison.
| belter wrote:
| >> If this is true, this is disappointing
|
| Wait for the second set of files...
|
| "...One of Mr. Epstein's former boat captains told The
| New York Times earlier this year that he had seen Mr.
| Brin on the island more than once..."
|
| https://dnyuz.com/2026/01/31/powerful-men-who-turn-up-in-
| the...
| wslh wrote:
| What's striking is the sheer scale of Epstein's and
| Maxwell's scheduling and access. The source material
| makes it hard to even imagine how two people could
| sustain that many meetings/parties/dinners/victims,
| across so many places, with such high-profile figures.
| And, how those figures consistently found the time to
| meet them.
| belter wrote:
| Ghislaine making a speech at the UN...
| https://youtu.be/-h5K3hfaXx4?t=350
| 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
| mullingitover wrote:
| Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their
| own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before
| ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in
| their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-
| like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were
| primarily around it using naughty language or spreading
| misinformation.
|
| I think they were worried that releasing a product like
| ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it
| might mess up their money printing operation over in
| advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer
| children: little did they know they could run an
| operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to
| manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it
| wouldn't make above-the-fold news.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
|
| [2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-
| grounded-and...
| xtracto wrote:
| Attention is all you need was written by Googlers IIRC.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Indeed, none of the current AI boom would've happened
| without Google Brain and their failure to execute on
| their huge early lead. It's basically a Xerox Parc do-
| over with ads instead of printers.
| bhadass wrote:
| I swear the Tay incident caused tech companies to be
| unnecessarily risk averse with chatbots for years.
| tempest_ wrote:
| The front runner is not always the winner. If they were
| able to keep pace with openai while letting them take all
| the hits and miss steps, it could pay off.
|
| Time will tell if LLM training becomes a race to the
| bottom or the release of the "open source" ones proves to
| be a spoiler. From the outside looking while ChatGPT has
| brand recognition for the average person who could not
| tell the difference between any two LLMs google offering
| Gemini in android phones could perhaps supplant them.
| Arainach wrote:
| >It's kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real
| products and competitive large scale models from their
| research.
|
| Not really. If Google released all of this first instead of
| companies that have never made a profit and perhaps never
| will, the case law would simply be the copyright holders
| suing them for infringement and winning.
| wslh wrote:
| > It's kind of crazy that they have been slow to create
| real products and competitive large scale models from their
| research.
|
| It's not that crazy. Sometimes the rational move is to wait
| for a market to fully materialize before going after it.
| This isn't a Xerox PARC situation, nor really the
| innovator's dilemma, it's about timing: turning research
| into profits when market conditions finally make it viable.
| Even mammoths like Google are limited in their ability to
| create entirely new markets.
| DSingularity wrote:
| This take makes even more sense when you consider the
| costs of making a move to create the market. The
| organizational energy and its necessary loss in focus and
| resources limits their ability to experiment. Arguably
| the best strategy for Google: (1) build foundational
| depth in research and infrastructure that would be
| impossible for competition to quickly replicate (2) wait
| for the market to present a clear new opportunity for you
| (3) capture it decisively by focusing and exploiting
| every foundational advantage Google was able to build.
| 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
| majormajor wrote:
| Quibi would be if someone came in 10 years from now and
| said "if we put a lot more money behind spitting out
| content using characters and settings from Hollywood IP
| than we'll obviously be way more popular than a tech
| company can be!"
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Use your own sh*t is one of the best way to build excellent
| products.
| 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.
| Mawr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Only if you're comparing them to another company, which
| you seem to be. So yes, yes it can.
|
| Seriously, the amount of sheer cope here is insane. Waymo
| is doing the thing. Tesla is not. If Tesla were capable
| of doing it, they would be. But they're not.
|
| It really is as simple as that and no amount of random
| facts you may bring up will change the reality. Waymo is
| _doing the thing_.
| schiffern wrote:
| >Waymo is _doing the thing._
|
| This worldview is overly simplistic.
|
| Waymo has (very shrewdly, for prospective investors at
| least) executed a strategy that most quickly scales to
| 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale
| further. The cars are too costly and the mapping is too
| costly. There is _no workable plan_ for significant scale
| from Waymo.
|
| Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales
| to 100% of the population.
| ra7 wrote:
| > _Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly
| scales to 100% of the population._
|
| So, uh... where is this "scale" then? This "strategy" has
| been bandied about for better part of a decade. Why are
| they still in a tiny geofence in Austin with chase cars?
|
| Waymo is doing it right now. _Half a million_ rides every
| week, expansion to a dozen new cities. Tesla does a few
| hundred in a tiny area.
|
| Scale is assessed by looking at concrete numbers, not by
| "strategies" that haven't materialized for a decade.
| essdas wrote:
| > most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population.
| Unfortunately it doesn't scale further
|
| Data suggests that they're already available to ~2% of
| the US population.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Practically ALL course introductory materials that regard
| robotics and AI that I've seen began with "you might imagine
| a talking bipedal humanoid when you hear the word `robot`,
| but perhaps the most commonplace robot that you have seen is
| a vending machine", with the illustration of a typical
| 80s-90s outdoor soda vendor with no apparent moving parts.
|
| So "maybe cars are a bit of robots too" is more like 30-50
| years behind the time.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Internal firewalls and poor management means that the vast
| majority of integration opportunities are missed.
| QuantumFunnel wrote:
| Also known as a monopoly. This should terrify us all.
| Andrex wrote:
| No, it's known as vertical integration, which is legally
| permitted by default.
| cman1444 wrote:
| Monopolies are essentially 100% horizontal integration.
| Vertical integration is a completely different concept.
| lagrange77 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.
|
| I view Tesla also more as a robot company than anything else.
| rswail wrote:
| Maybe they were focusing on a real world use that basically
| requires AI, but not LLMs.
|
| Tesla claimed that all their "real world" recording would give
| them a moat on FSD.
|
| Waymo is showing that a) you need to be able to incorporate
| stuff that isn't "real" when training, and b) you get a lot
| more information from alternate sensors to visible spectrum
| only.
| ericzundel wrote:
| I just listened to a fantastic multi-hour Acquired
| (https://www.acquired.fm/) podcast episode on Google and AI
| that talks about the history of Google and AI and all the ways
| they have been using it since 2012. It's really fascinating.
| You can forgive them for not focusing on Reader or any of their
| other properties when you realize they were pulling in hundreds
| of billions of dollars of value by making big bets in AI and
| incorporating it into their core business.
| theptip wrote:
| So is this a model baked into the VLLM layer? Or a scaffold
| that the agent sits in for testing?
|
| If the former then it's relevant to the broader discourse on
| LLM generality. If the latter, then it seems less relevant to
| chatbots and business agents.
|
| Edit to add: this is not part of the model, it's in a separate
| pillar (Simulator vs Driver). More at
| https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-
| auto....
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts
| to make sense.
|
| The apparent applicability to Waymo is incidental, more likely
| because a few millions+ were spent on Genie and they have to do
| something with it. DeepMind started to train "world models"
| because that's the current overhyped buzzword in the industry.
| First it was "natural language understanding" and "question
| answering" back in the days of old BERT, then it was "agentic",
| then "reasoning", now it's "world models", next years it's
| going to be "emotions" or "social intelligence" or some other
| anthropomorphic, over-drawn neologism. If you follow a few AI
| accounts on social media you really can't miss when those
| things suddenly start trending, then pretty much die out and
| only a few stragglers still try to publish papers on them
| because they failed to get the memo that we're now all running
| behind the Next Big Thing(tm).
| wiz21c wrote:
| notice that all these buzzwords you give actually correspond
| to real advances in the field. All of these were improvements
| on something existing, not a big revolution for sure, but
| definitely measurable improvements.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Those are not "real advances in the field", which is why
| they are constantly abandoned for the next new buzzword.
| 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
| crazygringo wrote:
| It is thus.
| 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?
| creata wrote:
| In my opinion there's nothing _wrong_ with it per se, but (a)
| it 's still worth mentioning, because most people have the
| impression that Waymo cars are completely unassisted, and (b)
| it makes me wonder how feasible Waymo's operations would be
| if it weren't for global income inequality.
| 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.
| smotched wrote:
| again, this is not europe. we don't ride bikes, and we
| certainly don't walk.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yeah, that's the root of a lot of problems in the US.
|
| But pedestrian infrastructure is a very simple problem to
| solve, even in the US. Just look at how the market
| responds to public transit projects in the US ---
| developers trip over themselves to build projects in
| response to the induced demand.
|
| Likewise they also responded to the reduced demand as a
| result of ripping out public transit infrastructure in
| the 20th century. Which is why doughnut-shaped cities are
| common in the US.
| 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?
| mkl wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918834
| kube-system wrote:
| They're like a back-seat driver instead of a driver. They
| can say "take that turn", or "go over there", but they
| can't operate the controls.
| 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...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That is a fair point, since it is fairly safe to make
| "this absolute claim will never happen." And the person I
| replied to did say 'exclusively', which implies 100%
| elimination of human drivers. But still, I appreciate
| your nuance.
|
| And in the spirit of that nuance, I will revise my
| statement slightly. I think it is entirely possible we
| will eliminate drivers on 10% of roads. We have rules
| that are analogous to that already with limited access
| highways. Though I would rate this still as unlikely,
| since such roads only make up just over 1% of all the
| roads in the US as it is. Not sure what the % is for
| other countries, probably less.
|
| > some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core
| autonomous vehicles only
|
| Agree 100%, this kind of thing I do expect to see happen.
| We already have exclusions for cars altogether in favor
| of pedestrians, so the precedent is set.
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many
| places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on
| limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous
| licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo
| management, etc), but still allowed.
| xnx wrote:
| I think that will be how human-driven cars are in 30(?)
| years. Rare, but allowed with restrictions.
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible
| and frequent than today's buses.
|
| In my sleepy metro area that has at least mid-tier
| respectable public transit (by US standards only),
| otherwise known as Portland, I think a lot of the routes
| would be better served by minibuses than full size. I
| wonder how the economics work out on that. Maybe dominated
| by labor? Tri-met drivers have a reputation of being paid
| handsomely as they gain seniority.
| ianburrell wrote:
| I'm also in Portland. In the US, bus costs are dominated
| by labor. It makes sense to use full size buses if paying
| for driver. For main routes, more automated buses would
| be best option. But there are cross town routes that
| should be served with minibuses. Especially ones feeding
| MAX stops.
| Mawr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Fundamentally impossible. You're moving some 2 tons of mass
| in a 2x5m box on polluting rubber tires to move a single
| 100kg human.
|
| I can always take whatever efficiency gain you've thought up
| and simply make the vehicle bigger, decreasing the cost and
| space used per passenger, and maybe even put it on rails,
| making it less polluting, and more energy efficient.
|
| You can't engineer your way out of the laws of physics.
|
| And don't even get me started on e-bikes.
| kube-system wrote:
| Only in lower density areas.
|
| In high density regions, vehicles on surface roads can't meet
| the passenger demand required. Even if you banned human
| drivers, the other human users introduce too much variability
| and delay (passengers loading and unloading, errant objects,
| cyclists and pedestrians, etc). Roll a dumpster in the
| street, and have a couple of jaywalkers, and the entire
| system crawls to a stop.
|
| Controlled access is required to get even medium-high
| throughput. But these systems already exist, they are called
| personal rapid transit systems.
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| I am very pro public transit. But there is still a place for
| cars (ideally mostly taxis). Going to more rural areas or when
| you need to carry more stuff. I think an ideal society would
| have both urban transit, inter-city transit and taxis for the
| other trips and going out into the country.
| 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...
| coolfox wrote:
| curious what your take away from that is given the
| announcement.
| 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.
| creata wrote:
| > It seems inevitable that they'll soon be used as the
| starting points for developing almost all video game
| environments.
|
| _Almost all_ video game environments? No way. That statement
| really needs to be qualified with the genres of games you 're
| considering.
| 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Sure but accident avoidance in sim racing is basically the
| ultimate test for any driver.
|
| I also said it wouldn't matter if they're fast, I don't care
| about driving at the limit of grip here, just avoiding
| accidents.
| 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...
| nurettin wrote:
| I don't know about the remote driver conspiracy, but waymo
| slowing down and that kid surviving a crash after jumping on
| the road from behind a tall vehicle was the best PR waymo
| could have asked for.
| 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.
| Mawr wrote:
| I'm looking. Comes out unfavorably to cars. Obviously.
|
| I guess you're comparing the total cost of trains vs a
| subset of costs of cars, as is usual. Road use and
| pollution are free externalities after all.
| 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.).
| cleaning wrote:
| Neither is any private transportation system?
| epsylon wrote:
| Public transportation is the backbone of a functioning
| economy. It doesn't need to be fully paid by riders
| precisely because the rest of society benefits from it
| multiple times over.
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Sure but most of the world has a density low enough that
| cars work and trains don't really. I like trains as much as
| the next nerd, but you're never going to be able to take a
| train from your house to your local farm shop or whatever.
|
| Where trains work they are great. Where they don't,
| driverless electric cars seem like a great option.
| epsylon wrote:
| Most of the world's population lives in places where
| trains and public transit works far better than cars.
| Density doesn't move around, people do.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't believe the data supports that claim.
|
| https://csh.ac.at/news/over-half-of-global-commutes-are-
| by-c...
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >without billions in subsidies
|
| Is there a magic road wand?
| xnx wrote:
| No, but roads are paid for by road users (i.e. everyone).
| 47282847 wrote:
| Huh? Last I looked, roads are paid for by the general
| public, not (car) road users?
| generalenvelope wrote:
| AFAICT, the majority (60%) of funding for roads doesn't
| come from direct user charges...
|
| Roads are subsidized, free parking (and generally a lot
| of paid parking) is subsidized, and the sprawl encouraged
| by car dependence combined with the resulting
| infrastructure costs has and will continue to bankrupt
| cities.
|
| I don't think we should "just only have trains", but the
| current US transit landscape is absurdly stupid and
| inefficient.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yeah I think the single biggest red flag that the US
| absolutely could support more public transit is the fact
| that many cities _successfully had_ more public transit
| in the past.
| fragmede wrote:
| Who pays for the war in Iraq?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| So its subsidized? I thought that was the problem.
| takethebus wrote:
| >cleanly >without subsidies
|
| Source? The biggest source of environmental issues from EVs,
| tire wear from a heavier vehicle, absolutely applies to AVs.
| VC subsidizing low prices only to hike them later isn't
| exactly "without subsidy" - we pay for it either way
| sznio wrote:
| better for the person vs better for the people
|
| sure, a private vehicle is better for me, but a train is
| better for the world
| 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?
| mkl wrote:
| Quite a few places. Cable propelled transit (CPT) is the
| term to search for.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondola_lift#Urban_transport
| 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.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| > most people don't want to use
|
| I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but this is a
| common NIMBY refrain. The argument of "This thing being
| advocated for that I'm fighting against isn't something
| people want anyway". And like walkable neighborhood
| architecture, extremely few Americans have access to
| light rail. Let alone light rail that doesn't have to
| yield to car traffic.
|
| Regardless, the cost arguments fall apart once you take
| the _total_ cost society pays for each system instead of
| only what the government pays. Because when you get the
| sum of road construction & maintenance, car acquisition,
| car maintenance, insurance, and parking, it dwarfs the
| cost of the local transit system. Break it down on a per-
| consumer basis and it gets even uglier. New York City is
| a good example to dive into, especially since it's the
| typical punching bag for "out-of-control" budgets.
|
| Quick napkin math pins the annual MTA cost at $32-$33
| billion and the total cost of the car system between $25
| and $44 billion per year. Since the former serves
| somewhere around 5.5 million riders, and the latter only
| about 2 million, the MTA costs $5,300-6,600 per user
| annually where the car system costs $12,000-$22,500 per
| user annually.
| scoofy wrote:
| You seem to be misunderstanding my point. _I am a transit
| alternatives advocate, and have been my entire adult
| life._
|
| I'm NOT saying "people don't want to ride trains."
|
| I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5%
| of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train
| platforms and in enclosed train cars."
|
| You might says "what? but that's not happening."
|
| In Chicago, yes it is: https://resphealth.org/snuff-out-
| smoking-on-cta/
|
| People want transit _as long as that transit reasonably
| meets their quality of life standards_. The reason why
| automobiles have been so popular -- _even while being
| wildly more expensive_ -- is exactly that they allow the
| user to adjust their travel to their optimal quality of
| life expectations.
|
| Public transit advocates need to be honest with
| themselves _that anti-social behavioral issues really
| matter to people._ People _are willing to pay more_ to
| have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system
| fails to meet that standard, then you 'll suddenly find
| yourself with a transit system _that people don 't want
| to use._
| lonjil wrote:
| > I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow
| 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train
| platforms and in enclosed train cars."
|
| Just don't allow that then?
|
| > Public transit advocates need to be honest with
| themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really
| matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have
| a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails
| to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself
| with a transit system that people don't want to use.
|
| "we can't have good transit because a few people who call
| themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very
| defeatist. Weak-spined politicians find it much easier to
| just set money on fire than actually solving problems, so
| even though most transit advocacy groups in the US
| emphasize quality and being less wasteful with budgets,
| your politicians usually prefer the worse options.
| scoofy wrote:
| >> I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow
| 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train
| platforms and in enclosed train cars."
|
| >Just don't allow that then?
|
| >"we can't have good transit because a few people who
| call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is
| very defeatist.
|
| My point here is only that this is a _hard_ problem, not
| a trivial one. When the transit advocates in my area just
| say "transit should be free" in response to "transit
| pricing is a complex problem that affects system
| fragility" and they say "stop hating homeless people" in
| response to "quality of life concerns matter to keeping
| the system functional long term" then we're in bad place,
| because the non-transit advocates _literally want to get
| rid of the system._ The last _TWO_ Muni funding bills in
| SF failed.
|
| We've built a system that can fail catastrophically, in
| large part, because transit advocates don't want to deal
| with the realities of running a functional transit
| system. This is why I get grumpy when people say "all
| this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better
| trains" when it's very clear _why_ Waymo is succeeding as
| Muni is failing, but it is exactly because Muni is mostly
| disconnected from market forces that we 've got to this
| place, and the "solution" being proposed by most transit
| advocates is to just _completely remove all market
| forces_ which will very obviously be worse is the long
| run.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| By various definitions of _most people_ , most people
| _do_ want to use public transit.
|
| It's just that Cars have rotted the American mind so much
| that to consider anything else is sacrilege.
| 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."
| fragmede wrote:
| > Roads don't make money and no one thinks to complain
| about that.
|
| Between toll roads, and the toll lanes, they do?
| stevula wrote:
| If they paid for themselves then the DoT wouldn't have a
| multibillion dollar highway budget, and that's not even
| including all the state funding.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| That is for Capex. Govt can always easily spend Capex,
| but Opex has to be covered by the users, whether its
| roads or trains.
| fragmede wrote:
| The claim wasn't they pay for themselves but that they
| don't generate any income. If we want to look at
| externalities, we'd also have to figure out how much the
| Iraq war cost.
| nunez wrote:
| They do through taxes or tolls!
| ragazzina wrote:
| "The U.S. generates approximately $17.4 billion in annual
| toll revenue".
|
| "The total annual cost for road maintenance in the U.S.
| is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with estimates
| showing over $200 billion spent yearly".
| caycep wrote:
| Maybe not BART but the new Caltrain electrification program
| seems to be a success and ridership and revenue are up
| scoofy wrote:
| https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/caltrain-says-could-
| clos...
| 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).
| scoofy wrote:
| >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.
|
| You're making my argument for me. Again, my concern isn't
| the day-to-day conveniences of funding, my point is that
| building a fragile system (a system where the funding is
| unrelated to the usability of the service) is a system that
| can fail catastrophically... for systems where there are
| obviously alternatives (say, National Rail which can be
| substituted for automobile, bus, and airplane service) are
| less to worry about, because their failure will likely not
| cause cascading failures. When an entire local economy is
| dependent on that system -- when there are not viable
| substitutes -- then you're really looking at a sudden
| economic collapse if the funding source runs dry, or if the
| system is ever mismanaged.
|
| This is a big deal. When funding _really actually does run
| out_ and the system fails, then if the result is an
| economic cascade into a full blown depression, then you
| would have been much better off just building the robust
| system in the long term. I just really don 't think people
| appreciate how systems can just fail. Whether it's Detroit
| or Caracas, when the economic tides turn in a fragile
| system people can lose everything in a matter of a few
| years.
| martinald wrote:
| But my point is that noone has a robust system according
| to you in Europe at least - the bar is so high to cover
| all operating costs with fares (or is that your point -
| if so I'm lost - I definitely would not recommend
| replacing European transit networks with nothing?).
|
| And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with
| bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of
| people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is
| just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would
| turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not
| even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact
| suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with
| many multiples of commuters.
|
| That's not even getting into what you consider fixed vs
| variable costs. Are the trains themselves a fixed cost
| (they should last 30-40 years)? Is track maintenance a
| fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the
| trains themselves), etc etc. The 2nd point is very
| important - a lot of rail operators in the UK can be made
| profitable or not on your metric by how much the
| government subsidises track maintenance vs the operators
| paying for it in track access charges.
|
| Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed
| costs? But really they are only required to run more
| frequent services. So you could argue they are a variable
| cost?
| scoofy wrote:
| >Are the trains themselves a fixed cost (they should last
| 30-40 years)?
|
| Yes
|
| >Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done
| more often than the trains themselves)
|
| Yes
|
| >Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed
| costs?
|
| Yes
|
| Fixed costs are the costs that don't go away when the
| passengers go away. Variable cost, typically labor, go
| away when you don't actually need that additional
| marginal train. You still have to amortize that train
| even if it's not on the tracks. You still need to _buy_
| that marginal train when the service levels require it.
| You still have to do track maintenance even when you 're
| not running trains (though, yes, at the very margin there
| could be some small rate adjustments). When you want to
| upgrade the signals, it's basically the definition of a
| fixed cost, because you do it once and it's done.
|
| >And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with
| bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of
| people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is
| just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would
| turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not
| even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact
| suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with
| many multiples of commuters.
|
| I don't want to speak to National Rail or British Rail
| that preceded it. I want to stick to the transit system
| that I know well.
|
| My point here isn't that money shouldn't be spent on
| "getting things back in shape" here is where I waffle on
| the "pay for fixed capital costs and _mostly_ have the
| marginal variable costs covered by the marginal rider. "
| If a system needs the occasional cash infusion, I'm fine
| with that, as long as it comes with new leadership.
|
| My concern here is that, in the Bay Area, many, many
| people are eager to pay $25 for a Waymo to pick them up
| (they are _NOT_ cheap) while Muni costs $3 (a near 10x
| increase in cost). When folks are willing to pay that
| much of a premium, then something is very wrong with the
| transit system. Muni has had zero enforcement of their
| code of conduct for _decades_. When you have a system
| that are large section of the populous _actively avoid_
| when it 's perfectly convenient, then something is very
| wrong with the system.
|
| When I see BART stations that look like abandoned parking
| lots surrounded by single family home sprawl, then it
| doesn't surprise me that the system is not sustainable.
| The stations that may get removed are all in areas that
| require people to drive, to then take the train, instead
| of the cities zoning density and retail around the train
| stations. When I yell at the occasional people smoking in
| BART stations and I go to tell the station attendant and
| get a shrug back -- even when we are paying for them to
| have their own police force -- that's why they are
| failing. These are political choices that BART has made
| in how they operate their service
|
| These systems aren't even doing the bare minimum in
| providing a reliable pleasant service, so people stop
| using them, and that makes sense. The entire point is
| that these services should be relatively inexpensive to
| operate because of economies of scale, but when you don't
| actually make people pay, when you don't actually ask
| people to behave like responsible adults, when your
| running the service like a failing business then we
| should expect the service to fail, and when it does, when
| bailouts are needed, they should (and often do) come with
| strings attached. BART now has gates that stop most
| turnstile jumping... _and they were forced to be
| installed by the state of California as part of their
| second bailout._ The reason I 'm harping on having
| variable costs attached to ridership is exactly because
| _the systems needs to be forced to respond_ when a
| sizable amount of people no longer find the service
| valuable.
|
| This is about sustainability, because the marginal tax
| dollar is better spend on something like providing people
| with the healthcare they need than it is providing people
| a bus service they're not even willing to actually use.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| It's worth noting that, at least for bart, the reason that it
| is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider
| supported and profitable, and not government supported.
|
| When ridership plummeted by >50% during the pandemic, fixed
| costs stayed the same, but income dropped. Last time I
| checked, if Bart ridership returned to 2019 levels, with no
| other changes, it would be profitable again.
| scoofy wrote:
| You can't say that BART "is facing bankruptcy is precisely
| because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and
| not government supported" when it is _very obvious_ that
| BART would be _in a much worse situation_ if it had had
| more government support... because all those governments
| are facing massive budget deficits right now.
|
| BART has already been bailed out by the state, _twice_. It
| has _already_ failed, twice. It very much _needs to reduce_
| the level service it provides if it wants to be
| sustainable, or seek other forms of revenues while we wait
| to see if ridership returns. Many have suggested BART
| explore the SE Asian model of generating revenues by
| developing residential housing, which seems fairly
| straightforward.
|
| If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue
| throwing good money after bad, and we ought to adjust the
| level of service to meet the level of revenues. Obviously
| the main problem here is that it's _literally illegal_ to
| just build high density corridors directly adjacent to the
| transit stations... which is what we ultimately need to
| prioritize.
| takethebus wrote:
| The government facing a budget deficit doesn't mean BART
| would be worse off with more subsidies.
| scoofy wrote:
| Where does the extra money come from in a deficit period?
|
| > BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit -- which an
| independent analysis confirmed face annual deficits of
| more than $800 million annually starting in fiscal year
| 2027-28
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/california/2026/01/06
| /ba...
|
| Nearly a billion dollar shortfall _per year_ going
| forward. That's nontrivial, and the state has lost
| patience with the systems after providing two bailouts
| already.
| takethebus wrote:
| Taxes? The same place tons of other stuff we buy as a
| society comes from. I expect the ballot measure this fall
| will pass, worst case they file bankruptcy and will
| probably need to reduce service
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean, sure? I'd prefer to have a system that has a
| system built in that raises and lowers the level of
| service in accordance with the number of people using the
| system rather than having to have random elections that
| decide whether or not we're going to effectively scrape a
| large parts of the system.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I think there's two important things here:
|
| 1. You want to be forward looking, not backwards looking.
| Cutting services means less ridership means less revenue
| means cutting services means...etc. Bart is super useful
| for me during the week because headways from SF to West
| Oakland are often 5m. As I'm writing this (11 on a
| Friday) I missed a train and had to wait 20 minutes.
| Every seat on the car is also full, and while not packed,
| it's standing room only. If my choice is to wait 20 mins
| for the next train, other ways of getting places become a
| lot more appealing.
|
| 2. Government services should be good. This is good both
| because it makes people interested in using them (see 1)
| and because people who don't have other options deserve
| good services. The point of government is, at least in
| part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't
| expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I
| don't expect CalFRESH to be.
| scoofy wrote:
| > Cutting services means less ridership means less
| revenue means cutting services means...etc.
|
| That's not true. If you have stations that are revenue
| positive and stations that are net negative, then cutting
| ridership at the net-negative stations can put the system
| in a much better financial position. E.g. If BART didn't
| end at Antioch, and instead continued to Rio Vista, it's
| entirely likely that the Rio Vista station would just
| cost more to operate than is worth operating. It takes
| time to go back and forth, nobody will ever want to be
| picked up there because it's car-dependent sprawl. Maybe
| have one or two stops there during rush hour, but you'll
| likely be better financially cutting most service.
|
| >headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m
|
| Nobody is suggesting cutting service between SF and
| Oakland. I'm sure it's a wildly profitable route.
| Crossing the bay is the main benefit of BART.
|
| >The point of government is, at least in part, to serve
| those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to
| be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect
| CalFRESH to be.
|
| I _also_ don 't expect BART to be revenue neutral. I
| expect it to be funded -- in very large part -- by taxes.
| I'm only arguing it should be _sustainable_. It shouldn
| 't get to the point of _literal collapse_ during economic
| downturns (again, it 's already been bailed out by the
| state and feds, _twice_ , in the last six years).
|
| I really don't think people realize what I'm getting at.
| I'm saying the system _needs to be functional_ and needs
| to function long term. Yes, I think we should subsidize
| low-income users. Yes, I think people who can 't afford
| it should still be able to use it. But that has to happen
| in a way that doesn't drive away significant numbers of
| other users. There's nothing about being low-income that
| means anti-social. I'm talking about anti-social
| behavior. I'm talking about people smoking cigarettes and
| using drugs on BART platforms and in BART cars. I'm
| talking about people who are actively bothering
| significant numbers of people around them by their
| behavior -- behavior that is against BART policy, but is
| tolerated.
|
| You can't sit here and tell me the current system is
| working when BART is perpetually collapsing. I care about
| BART. That's why I'm articulating the systemic problems
| in the system.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > You can't say that BART "is facing bankruptcy is
| precisely because it was mostly rider supported and
| profitable, and not government supported" when it is very
| obvious that BART would be in a much worse situation if
| it had had more government support... because all those
| governments are facing massive budget deficits right now.
|
| I don't think this follows. Government budgeting isn't
| zero based. A hypothetical Bart with 2x the government
| funding in 2019 would have faced cutbacks, but likely has
| more money today than what we have now!
|
| > or seek other forms of revenues while we wait to see if
| ridership returns.
|
| Yes, this is called "taxes".
|
| > If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue
| throwing good money after bad
|
| Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than
| 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track
| to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting
| services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do
| for something like a startup showing clear path toward
| profitability.
|
| > Obviously the main problem here is that it's literally
| illegal to just build high density corridors directly
| adjacent to the transit stations... which is what we
| ultimately need to prioritize
|
| While sure it's hard, there's lots of these that exist.
| There's new stuff in oakland basically constantly, and
| were even seeing midrise stuff along Bart in SF, but it's
| units being built now, so they won't be available until
| 2027, which is when your proposed service cuts would hit.
| scoofy wrote:
| >Government budgeting isn't zero based. A hypothetical
| Bart with 2x the government funding in 2019 would have
| faced cutbacks, but likely has more money today than what
| we have now!
|
| A hypothetical BART with 2x the government funding
| wouldn't have existed... because _it didn 't exist_.
|
| >Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than
| 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track
| to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting
| services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do
| for something like a startup showing clear path toward
| profitability.
|
| You're mistaking what I'm saying. I want BART to
| flourish, but I want it to be sustainable. The choice
| isn't "keep it open" or "close it." How it is operated
| matters significantly. I'm _very obviously_ going to vote
| to increase funding, my point is that _it shouldn 't have
| to come to a vote_. If service is reduced to a more
| sustainable rate, the system could recover organically.
| The revenue jump that has happened at stations
| immediately after the gates were installed, for example,
| shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm a transit advocate, BART
| is mostly irrelevant to this discussion anyway, because
| we're talking about situations where Waymo is a viable
| alternative, which really doesn't apply to BART.
| takethebus wrote:
| Very few transit agencies have fares that cover services. I
| know others said this, but I wanted to add my take as well
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm not advocating that they do. Fixed costs should be
| fully subsidized. I'm only advocating that revenues are set
| so that during a median year, each additional rider on
| average, provides income that is proportional to the level
| of service needed to move that rider through the system.
| jsrozner wrote:
| over the long term, this is solved with a wealth tax, but
| undoing what rich ppl have done to society (i.e. making lots
| of poor people) will unfortunately take many, many years; so
| many years that it will never actually happen
| scoofy wrote:
| My entire point is mostly not even about the money. It's
| about the system having to respond as a service to the fact
| that people _don 't want to use that service_ and are
| willing to pay a _huge_ premium for alternatives like
| Waymo.
| nunez wrote:
| As a fellow public transit fan, you're on the money. Even the
| shining stars of transit in the US --- NYC MTA subway and CTA
| --- have huge qualuty of life issues. I can't fault someone
| for not wanting to ride trains ever again when someone who
| hasn't showered in 41 years pulls up with a cart full of
| whatever the fuck and decides to squat the corner seat
| closest to the car door and be a living biological weapon
| during rush hour. Or "showtime."
|
| That's before you consider how it takes 2-4x as long to get
| somewhere by public transit outside of peak hours and/or
| well-covered areas. A 20 minute trip from a bar in Queens to
| Brooklyn by car takes an hour by train after 2300, not
| including walking time. I made that trip many, many times,
| and hated it each time.
| magguzu wrote:
| Is that a public transit problem or a societal/homelessness
| problem?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Trains work in every city in Europe and Asia.
| 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.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| Price helps a whole lot, I think more than you give it
| credit for. Driving is also an active thing, this also
| helps.
|
| We also police driving behaviour, in a way that nobody does
| for public behaviour.
|
| And no matter what I don't have to hear or smell other
| drivers.
| scoofy wrote:
| The vast majority of the anti-social behavior on public
| transit not relevant in automobiles because (1) you can't
| turnstile jump the gas tank, (2) an automobile is
| effectively very expensive set of headphones, and (3) you
| can inhale whatever you want in your vehicle and your
| neighbor doesn't have to breath it.
|
| Automobiles are a wildly inefficient and expensive form of
| transportation in urban areas. At the same time, we ought
| to be willing to ask why a significant amount of our urban
| population still prefers to pay all that extra money to sit
| in traffic.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think they have a point. But the anti-social behaviors
| in a car on the road are mostly a different set of anti
| social behaviors than you'd see on a bus or train. But
| they certainly exist.
| scoofy wrote:
| Oh, no doubt that people can be anti-social on the road.
| My only point is that anti-social behavior on the road is
| different in kind.
| digbybk wrote:
| > everyone with sense avoids the whole thing
|
| Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their
| daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily
| use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in
| traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If
| you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the
| spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more
| narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
| redox99 wrote:
| NYC people uses it because the alternatives are either
| slower or much more expensive. I'm sure they'd rather use a
| waymo if it was as fast and cheap as the subway.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think the point is doubting whether it is ever possible
| for Waymo to ever be as fast or cheap as public transport
| in NYC.
| servo_sausage wrote:
| The cost of avoiding public transport in NYC is massive
| compared to most cities...
|
| Living there, without the means to avoid public transport
| is something I would also consider insane.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I think future generations will resent us for bureaucratizing
| our way out of the California HSR.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| No matter what, people are going to still use cars because they
| are an absolute advantage over public transportation for
| certain use cases. It is better that the existing status quo is
| improved to reduce death rates, than hope for a much larger
| scale change in infrastructure (when we have already seen that
| attempts at infrastructure overhaul in the US, like high-speed
| rail, is just an infinitely deep money pit)
|
| Even though the train system in Japan is 10x better than the US
| as a whole, the per-capita vehicle ownership rate in Japan is
| not much lower than the US (779 per 1000 vs 670 per 1000). It
| would be a pipe dream for American trains/subways to be as good
| as Japan, but even a change that significant would lead to a
| vehicle ownership share reduced by only about 13%.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Enough with the trains. I'm all for trains but theyre good for
| in city or 1-3 hour journeys. Taking a train across the US
| would take a day even with high speed trains.
|
| I'd much rather have my own vehicle than share my space with a
| bunch of people.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Pretty much this. Wild that you can traverse most of China in
| affordable high speed trains, yet the Amtrak from Seattle to
| Portland barely crawls along and has to regularly stop for long
| periods of time because the tracks get too hot in the Summer.
| eddiekm wrote:
| I'd rather be able to go wherever I want.
| 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.
| aaaalone wrote:
| You should be able to see if it is generated wrong after
| you see a car driving in it.
|
| I can spot Halluzination in LLM too
| 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?
| klysm wrote:
| It's autonomous!
| bharrison wrote:
| The tornado?
| gokuldas011011 wrote:
| ML models doesn't have fight or flight, so we'll have to
| show them tornado and teach to run away.
| 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| It's a pareto principal.
|
| You can get 80% of the way to "perfect" with 20% of the
| effort.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That's just a platitude at this point. They for all intents
| and purposes solved the problem, atleast in the US.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't think you say "ok now the car is ball bearing proof."
|
| Think of it more like unit tests. "In this synthetic scenario
| does the car stop as expected, does it continue as expected."
| You might hit some false negatives but there isn't a downside
| to that.
|
| If it turns out your model has a blind spot for albino cows in
| a snow storm eating marshmallows, you might be able to catch
| that synthetically and spend some extra effort to prevent it.
| notatoad wrote:
| seems like the obvious answer to that is you cover a patch of
| road with 5mm ball bearings, and send a waymo to drive across
| it. if the ball bearings behave the way the simulation says
| they would, and the car behaves the way the simulation said it
| would, then you've validated your simulation.
|
| do that for enough different scenarios, and if the model is
| consistently accurate across every scenario you validate, then
| you can start believing that it will also be accurate for the
| scenarios you haven't (and can't) validate.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Looks like they need to blackouts and parades to that
| simulator...
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/waymo-paralyzed-parade-b...
| disillusioned wrote:
| The blackouts circumstance was because they escalate
| blinking/out of service traffic lights to a human confirmed
| decision, and they experienced a bottleneck spike in those
| requests for how little they were staffed. The Waymo itself
| was fine and was prepared to make the correct decision, it
| just needed a human in the loop.
|
| In the video from the parade... there's just... people in the
| road. Like, a lot of small children and actual people on this
| tiny, super narrow bridge. I think that erring on the side of
| "don't think you can make it but accidentally drag a small
| child instead" is probably the right call, though admittedly,
| these cases are a bit wonky.
| sznio wrote:
| >The blackouts circumstance was because they escalate
| blinking/out of service traffic lights to a human confirmed
| decision
|
| Which isn't really a scalable solution. In my city the
| majority of streetlights switch to blinking yellow at
| night, with priority/yield signs instead. I can't imagine a
| human having to approve 10 of these on any route.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> How do you know the generated outputs are correct?
| Especially for unusual circumstances?
|
| You know the outputs are correct because the models have many
| billions of parameters and were trained on many years of video
| on many hectares of server farms. Of course they'll generate
| correct outputs!
|
| I mean that's literally the justification. There aren't even
| any benchmarks that you can beat with video generation, not
| even any bollocks ones like for LLMs.
| red75prime wrote:
| I guess we first need to create a formal model for elephant
| ear flapping, a goose psychosocioneural behavioral model, and
| so on and so forth. It will take centuries, but, at least,
| we'll be able to formally verify all those generated videos.
| Or we can compute loss function for prediction/reality
| discrepancy, backpropagate, and validate.
| 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!!!
| kevincox wrote:
| Driving is always a balance between speed and safety. If you
| want ultimate safety you just sit in the driveway. But
| obviously that isn't useful. So functionally one of the most
| important things a self-driving system will decide is "how fast
| is it safe to drive right now". Slower is not always better and
| it has to balance safety with productivity.
| Mawr wrote:
| Not entering a roundabout when it's clearly safe to do so is a
| mark against you at a driving exam. So would be always driving
| at 5mph. It's just not that simple.
| ajcp wrote:
| Not at all. It's not the counter-factual they're generating,
| it's the "too rare to capture often enough to train a response
| to" they're generating.
|
| They're implying that without the model having knowledge, even
| approximate, of a scene to react to, it simply doesn't react at
| all; it simply "yields" to the situation until it passes. In my
| experience taking Waymo's almost daily this holds.
|
| I would rather not have the Waymo yield to a tornado, rising
| flood-waters, or charging elephant...
| b_brief wrote:
| I would love to see more visibility into how this model's
| simulation fidelity maps onto measurable safety improvements on
| public roads, especially in unusual edge conditions like partial
| sensor occlusion or atypical weather.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| I don't get how this solves the problem of edge cases with self
| driving
|
| Even if you can generate simulated training data, don't you still
| have the problem where you don't even know what the edge cases
| you need to simulate are in the first place?
| sixo wrote:
| Well it certainly helps,doesn't it? This system is going to
| encounter more edge cases than a single human ever would.
| Hopefully the lessons from known unknowns generqlise to
| unknowns. And once they've been seen once they took can become
| part of the corpus.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Right but does this just rely on some human "brainstorming" a
| bunch of edge cases?
|
| It just strikes me as neverending edge case wack-a-mole
|
| A human doesn't need to see tons of examples of tornados and
| elephants to know to stop the car
|
| Doesn't that indicate some fundamental difference between the
| model and a human driver?
| Mawr wrote:
| Neither does the car -- it won't drive into what LIDAR sees
| as a wall. But stopping is not good enough, it needs to be
| able to navigate the obstacle as well.
|
| Also, even if the car behaved perfectly anyway, these
| scenarios are useful for testing -- validating that the
| expected behavior happens.
| sixo wrote:
| It might be "never-ending", but you're going to encounter
| edge cases in approximate proportion to the rate at which
| they actually occur. Anyway, the hope would be to learn
| behaviors which generalize, not to respond to each edge
| case ad-hoc; the edge cases provide out-of-sample tests of
| generalizability.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I don't think coming up with novel situations is all that hard.
| LLMs already do it in text form all the time.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| How big is the space of possible things a car can encounter?
|
| It's practically infinite, your domain is 3D space and time
|
| You can't just generate every possible scenario
|
| That would be a combinatorially insane amount of data
| tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm wrote:
| so insane that this is the direction things are going, instead of
| just reducing our reliance on cars
| RivieraKid wrote:
| The term "world model" seems almost meaningless. This is a world
| model in the same sense as ChatGPT is a world model. Both have
| some ability to model aspects of the real world.
| andrewdb wrote:
| So when will multiple Waymo cars communicate input data to one
| another to avoid the blind spots?
|
| This would give the ability to see things other cars cannot see
| as well.
| heohk wrote:
| I'm curious how they simulate equipment failures, like a flat
| tire or something
| nurettin wrote:
| > Simulation of the Waymo Driver evading a vehicle going in the
| wrong direction.
|
| It really looks like waymo is the one going in the wrong
| direction and driving dangerously to evade traffic in this
| simulation.
| nelsondev wrote:
| Neat! What happens when the simulated data is
| hallucinated/incorrect?
|
| In the example videos, the Golden Gate bridge with snow shows the
| bridge as 1 road, with total of 3 lanes. But in reality, it's a
| split highway with divider, so 2 sides both have 3 lanes, 6 total
| lanes.
|
| What happens when the car "learns" to drive on the simulated
| incorrect 3 lane example? For example will next time it goes on
| the real GG bridge hug to the rightmost lane?
| sixo wrote:
| Ideally it would learn a relationship between the sensor input
| and the correct actions, even if the sensor input is not
| realistic for the GG in reality.
| seydor wrote:
| Why don't they call it 'the Matrix' and should i prepare for the
| plugs?
| LowLevelBasket wrote:
| Every time I'm in town I use a waymo. It's still a little weird
| to be a passenger with no driver
| uvesten wrote:
| So the waymo driver is dreaming, testing out different scenarios,
| basically...
| crooked-v wrote:
| I'm a little sad that they talk about counterfactuals in the
| simulations, but then don't show any examples of even a single
| sharknado or giant loop-de-loop.
| ubixar wrote:
| been playing around with world models for sim-to-real transfer
| lately. the waymo approach looks solid, but curious how you're
| handling the distribution shift between generated scenes and real
| sensor data. any tricks for that besides the usual domain
| randomization?
| patrick451 wrote:
| No human needs to have seen an elephant standing in the road
| before to know that you should not drive through an elephant
| standing in the road. These are not "long tail" events as the
| waymo says. It's a big object in the road. You have seen that
| hundreds of thousands of times. Calling that a long tail event is
| an admission that your model has zero ability to generalize.
| simontheowl wrote:
| Does this model include things like how slippery the road is, or
| head wind/ cross wind. Or is it only visual / depth model?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| So in order to create a self driving car, you must first create
| the universe
| Zigurd wrote:
| The amount to which supposedly engineering based rationales are
| applied to Elon's decisions is cult like behavior. Here's what's
| really going on:
|
| That thing I called full self driving just to troll government
| regulators? Just make it work and don't complain about what I
| called it.
|
| That rocket that's way too big for orbital payloads but can't go
| beyond orbit without sending 20 more rockets full of fuel? Just
| make it work. Occupy Mars!
|
| The two car models that work and have a halo effect on the rest
| of the product line? I'mma cancel that! Just make the stupid
| truck we're keeping work!
|
| We've all had a boss like that. I'm sure they salute each other.
| VivaTechnics wrote:
| Similar to Kiva Systems which was Amazon's best acquisition,
| Waymo is simply Google's best acquisition. (We live in San
| Francisco and it feels much safer around these Waymo cars than
| average "drivers".)
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| those zoox cars though. watchout!
| qeternity wrote:
| Have there been any reported instances of Waymo cars being
| stolen?
|
| Disabled and then loaded into a lead-lined trailer or something.
|
| I imagine the IP running locally on the cars is worth billions.
| gpm wrote:
| I doubt Waymo would publicly talk about this if it did happen.
|
| I also doubt the IP is worth that much. Most of the secret
| sauce to starting a competitor probably isn't an end model
| tuned for a specific configuration of a car but the ability to
| produce end models, which wouldn't be stealable from the car.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| How large is the controlled area around the car? And how high do
| they look for objects? Like something is falling from a bridge, a
| falling pole or more extreme an falling plane.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| Ah the typical MDS npc comes out in the swarm, saying how FSD is
| no better than GM solutions.
|
| Time to eat pop corn, while FSD drives me for the next hour while
| I scroll hackernews
| pstuart wrote:
| It's clear that lidar is superior to the Tesla cameras only
| approach, but I wonder if being able to take all that data and be
| able to better correlate what is being seen visually with what
| the lidar is showing.
|
| That said, for autonomous driving I'd like to see as many sensor
| options as possible: lidar, radar, cameras, sonar. Belt and
| suspenders. I imagine as pricing continues to drop all will be
| embraced.
| insuranceguru wrote:
| as someone looking at this from a risk and liability perspective,
| the move toward world models is pretty wild. the edge cases where
| a model predicts a safe path that doesn't align with physics is
| basically the final boss of insurance underwriting for autonomous
| vehicles. curious how they actually validate for 'common sense'
| reality vs just predicting the next frame.
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