[bsaul]

Thanks, i was expecting something beyond just the lidar thing. Can you elaborate more about mapping + remote ? I've never tested neither a tesla autopilot nor a waymo (european here).

edit : also, are there differences in the core algorithms ? Tesla seems to be full AI / ML. Is waymo the same ? ( as the company is older i wonder if they haven't built more things manually)

[jowday]

Neither of them are “full AI/ML”, they’re both traditional robotics systems with ML used for detection/prediction/planning at certain steps. Elon will sometimes say something about moving to a “new ML stack”, but Tesla reverse engineers regularly look inside of what’s running in the cars and that’s not the case at all.

Contrary to what other people in this thread are saying, the remote support isn’t remote direct driving of the car - essentially what will happen is that if the car finds itself in a situation where it’s unsure of how to proceed and it’s safe to stop, it will pause for a few seconds and wait for a remote operator to clarify a situation for it.

A good example might be road construction - if the car detects new road construction work that doesn’t match its map of the area, and its onboard systems determine that it’s not sure how to proceed through the construction with confidence, it will send what it thinks the top five likeliest ways to proceed to a remote operator. The operator then selects the proper path (or says that none of them are proper). The car will then follow the path presented by the operator, but actual driving behavior /collision detection / pathfinding is still determined locally. Think of it like ordering a unit around in StarCraft.

[pnw]

You can actually see this behavior in the car when it runs into a difficult situation. It tells you it's asking for assistance or something similar, and pauses for a few seconds.

I also made the mistake of assuming the remote operator drives the car but if you watch Waymo's technical videos, it's clear that the AI is in control of the car all all times and the remote operator is just doing near real time labelling of what the car is seeing.

[spankalee]

> Tesla reverse engineers regularly look inside of what’s running in the cars and that’s not the case at all

How are they doing this on the software stack? Any references?

[jowday]

Same way reverse engineer get access to internals of other devices - a bunch of tricks. :^)

In one case, greentheonly realized some fraction of Tesla’s cars are shipped out of the factory still in dev mode, with debug mode enabled and increased privileges. He found someone with a car like this who was down to helped and swapped part of his cars hardware with their car, and from then on was able to get a much better view of what was running on his car.

Unfortunately twitter is awful to search and a lot of his info is buried deep in old threads, but a few (old) examples to illustrate that he regularly does this.

Visualizing the outputs of the models running in the car: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1404164587927314435

Tesla’s dev debug menus circa 2020: https://x.com/greentheonly/status/1336467014727110656

It’s been a while since I’ve worked in the space so I haven’t followed green as closely.

[spankalee]

Wow, thanks!

[ra7]

Waymo has been at the forefront of cutting edge AI/ML since the beginning: https://waymo.com/research/

This is a good read: https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominat...

This talk by Waymo co-CEO is even better (especially from 33:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U

[Workaccount2]

It's a fallacy to really compare them directly. Waymo has active cars in service that are available to the general public. Tesla right now just has promises that they have been unable to deliver on for almost a decade now, as their approach is pretty radical.

[schmidtleonard]

Yes, Elon puffery is silly, but so is throwing the comparison in favor of your preferred team by precision-selecting a metric that does so.

Driverless miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 0

Self-driving miles: Waymo 20M, Tesla 2000M

[UltraSane]

Miles driven with assumed legal liability: Waymo 20m, Tesla 0

I don't think Tesla will ever operate a self-driving car with no driver where they are legally liable for crashes.

[ra7]

What's a "self-driving mile"?

Only metric that counts is driverless miles. That's the true test of autonomy.

[schmidtleonard]

It's a mile driven by the car, not by a human. An easy concept to understand, unless you don't want to understand it.

If you want to play the "ultimate goal" game, the ultimate goal is to do it all profitably at scale -- and Tesla is way ahead on that front, which is why their fleet self-drives almost as much per day as Waymo's fleet has ever driven.

Time will tell, but anyone who can't make a case for both "Tesla wins" and "Waymo wins" scenarios is a fanboy with deeply compromised thought processes.

[ra7]

If miles driven by cars under human supervision counted, Toyota cruise control would clock the highest. Autonomy is a binary: it’s either driverless or it’s not. There’s no need to invent terms such as “self driving mile”.

Tesla may be profitable, but nowhere close to a working solution. So how far ahead are they really?

[UltraSane]

Tesla's system is so fragile it needs a human ready to take over at any second to prevent a crash. Compared to Waymo Tesla FSD is like a kid using training wheels.

[infecto]

Touched on it to your original question but they require cars to drive through their service regions on a regular basis to keep a very detailed map of the environment. Not just the 2d map of a representation of the entire environment. On the remote part, Waymo will encounter trouble and they have support to take control of the vehicle remotely.