| > 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. 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. |