[haltist]

It's not an allegation. It's the same as using human feedback for tuning large language models. There are no autonomous cars currently regardless of what is written on the marketing brochures. In various "emergency" situations the cars phone home and ask a human operator to take over the controls.

[ra7]

This is completely incorrect. Remote operators cannot “take over controls” at all and hence cannot help in any “emergency” i.e. safety critical situation (e.g. preventing a crash). All they can do is assist the vehicle with things drawing a path to get around a parked vehicle, instructing it to do a multi-point turn when it’s stuck and so on.

What the article says is that Cruise vehicles need some sort of assistance every 2.5 to 5 miles (I highly doubt this number is accurate). Not that they’re getting into emergency situations that frequently.

[haltist]

Do you work at Cruise?

[ra7]

No.

[haltist]

Then you wouldn't know if I was completely incorrect or not.

[ra7]

I do because I know self driving companies have talked about how remote operations work. It doesn’t involve taking control of the vehicle.

Here’s a Waymo engineer explaining how they can’t joystick a car: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/s/2ujFLZoLbo

And here is Zoox’s video about their teleoperations: https://youtu.be/NKQHuutVx78?si=4PDnG0gQm6lEnp9v

No reason to believe Cruise is doing any different. If you have evidence of the contrary, please share it.

[haltist]

So you are 100% certain that remote operators can not take over the car?

[l33t7332273]

> It's the same as using human feedback for tuning large language models

It isn’t remotely the same. This would be like if human operators typed some of chatGPTs answers

[haltist]

OK, you must know more than I do about how human feedback is used for tuning large language models.

[hartator]

There is an emergency every 2-5 miles?

[alkonaut]

That sounds pretty low if it's city driving or poor conditions. I know some of the trial cities are basically easy mode (wide streets, almost never snows..) but still.

[KennyBlanken]

First off: not even close. Waymo has a disengagement rate of 0.076 per 1,000 miles.

Second: You're shifting the goalposts from the grandparent comment's assertion that these interventions are to be expected in an "emergency", when the frequency of the interventions shows they're clearly not "emergency" interventions but part of normal operation.

[throwaway5959]

The latency on that has to be massive.

[jonhohle]

Why? UAVs are piloted remotely, video games are played remotely with sub-100ms latency.

Getting a remote driver connected might a while, but afterwards it seems like a mostly solved (in practice) problem.

[notahacker]

UAVs don't have to deal with traffic (the thought of driving a vehicle with the latency and intermittent connectivity of my drone horrifies me) and when someone dies in a video game they respawn...

[pests]

No lag compensation. Extremely server-authoritative.

[throwaway5959]

I wasn't talking about signal latency, I was talk about the time it took for an operator to sign on and take control.

[SkyPuncher]

It might not actually matter. Since the car can operate autonomously already, the operator doesn't necessarily need to literally drive the car. They might simply need to hop in to verification of actions in unusual situations.

I'm imagining a situation where a car comes across a parked truck on a one-way road (common in cities). A human operator comes in the loop to ensure that it's actually safe to switch lanes and pass. Check for things like emergency vehicles, unusual pedestrians, etc. They don't need to literally take the wheel, just confirm that the vehicle can take a specific action.

[haltist]

It's good enough for the routes that Cruise uses in the city.