| Not my understanding of his premise - I don't feel like your statements have actually countered his point. I have actually been looking for a true counterargument to their approach and so far everything I've come across I don't buy into. If anyone has anything countering/disputing Tesla's approach - please share! I can't help but feel like there is something I DON'T see that many smart, respectable people see and understand that I just haven't seen. Also thanks for the link shares, but I don't think either actually disproves Tesla's approach. My understanding of the Tesla approach is: In order to truly 'solve' self-driving (situations on the road that have never been seen before to drive safely - think unannounced construction, collision or road closures due to protests), you MUST solve 'vision' with a very, very complicated and well trained neural net (re: ridiculous intelligence in the form of a human brain as you state). In addition, the existing road infrastructure (re: signs) is all built around human vision - and so being able to identify and interpret all of that is a requirement. I find their approach compelling as in this instance where you have cameras with a particular neural net (which they are constantly refining the learning model on) that are training across the millions of cars across the billions of miles across the thousands of various edge cases into a generalized solution. You also have a re-enforcement loop via the nature of a human driver which 'intervenes' through the drive, a necessary step in refining the model at scale. Note: I am not saying that Tesla's FSD will be coming to a street near you anytime soon. BUT, I haven't heard or understood a well articulated argument that says 'lidar is really the only practical solution'. This also doesn't factor in that I've heard Lidar doesn't work well in any kind of precipitation (light being refracted away from the sensor). Also, full self driving doesn't mean it can drive in situations that humans WOULDN'T be comfortable with (i.e. snowy blizzard or thick fog) so in either solution shouldn't be factored in as a part of the required solution set. And finally, the practical threshold on a FSD system that would pass regulatory approval is evidence/data that it is materially safer than a 'typical' human driver. It seems the 'throw millions of cars and billions/trillions of miles at it' with a refined tagging system that approaches the narrow vision solution for driving forward in 'driveable space' seems to be most likely to reach a solution first. |
Yeah this is dubious. You need to solve situational awareness. Vision is one way of doing this. Lidar is another, and lidar avoids many of the drawbacks of vision (having to do accurate world modeling based on cameras).
Tesla doesn't (and would be stupid to) feed camera data directly into a neural network. They feed multiple cameras into a complex system that involves both classical object positioning and neural networks to build a model of their surroundings. Then a downstream system consumes that model and makes decisions.
Its not a single end to end black box. Such an approach would be computationally infeasible, not to mention over-parameterized to all hell. No one does this, not Waymo and not Tesla.
While cameras are good at certain tasks (like detecting traffic lights), they are not good at all tasks, and using more specialized hardware for object detection and world modeling means that lidar based systems are strictly better. They have more information than camera based ones.
Tesla is betting on, somehow, making some breakthrough in computer vision that no one else can replicate, and further that lidar can't do what cameras can.
Your argument appears to be that since Tesla has more data, they'll achieve some eventual success, but the point is that they'd achieve more success faster with lidar, and everyone in CV seems to agree that we'd need pretty fundamental improvements in CV (and perhaps in cameras) before you get the same performance out of CV that you get out of lidar. That means that Tesla's betting on a less accurate world model being good enough. Maybe they're right, but so far we have some evidence to suggest that cameras alone have some pretty fatal shortcomings, and no evidence that Tesla has solved them.