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0 pointsbertil2y ago0 comments

They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest.

That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?

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TaylorAlexander2y ago

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

londons_explore2y ago

With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly.

Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor.

And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system.

If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.

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threeseed2y ago

> They’ll get there eventually

Debatable.

So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

TaylorAlexander2y ago

True, true. We may see a change of heart for them if solid state LiDAR ever actually hits the market, but last I checked Velodyne/Ouster keep announcing things and then letting them disappear. I did see them saying they have samples available for 2025 model years cars so perhaps Tesla could be testing with that now. I don’t see them deploying mechanical LiDAR but solid state is similar enough to a camera they may do it.

Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.

mensetmanusman2y ago

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

TaylorAlexander2y ago

Well they currently devote a lot of compute power to building a 3D occupancy map of the world from cameras so it’s possible that fusion with LiDAR could be done with less compute. Also their computers keep getting more powerful. But generally you’re correct, we don’t know how it would go.

ra72y ago

Using LiDAR means you are actually saving on compute resources since you're now getting direct distance measurements instead of inferring using ML.

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threeseed2y ago

Everyone except Tesla uses LiDAR.

So any compute issues are not preventing adoption.

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TaylorAlexander2y ago

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

londons_explore2y ago

With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly.

If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.

1 more reply

threeseed2y ago

> They’ll get there eventually

Debatable.

So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

TaylorAlexander2y ago

Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.

mensetmanusman2y ago

TaylorAlexander2y ago

ra72y ago

Using LiDAR means you are actually saving on compute resources since you're now getting direct distance measurements instead of inferring using ML.

1 more reply

threeseed2y ago

Everyone except Tesla uses LiDAR.

So any compute issues are not preventing adoption.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse