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by bcoates 555 days ago
There are (crappy, dangerous-seeming) genuine full autonomous-assuming-you-don't-count-remote-safety-drivers Waymos on the street where I live, in volume, for a while now.

Tesla's equivalent system appears to be 100% vaporware. I don't understand the case for them not being far behind.

2 comments

That means you live in 1 of like 6 cities in the world. Kind of hard to compare Waymo's approach and Tesla's approach and accurately judge how far ahead Waymo is. Come to my city and you will see exactly 0 Waymo's. And it isn't clear to me if it's much easier for Waymo to scale from 6 cities to tens of thousands of cities or for Tesla to scale from tens of thousands of cities to tens of thousands of cities but better.

My gut tells me Waymo is ahead, probably by a good amount. But calling Telsa FSD "vaporware" is absurd, and leads me to the same conclusion that GP already called out.

The equivalent system is no driver in car at all, and unless there's some trial I don't know about, Tesla's product that does that is announced but not existing anywhere, 0 cities, 0 cars. the definition of vaporware.
I don’t think FSD is vaporware, but I believe it has been massively overpromised and underdelivered. And also, I have reason to believe its going to require yet another major hardware revision - despite teslas protestations
Have a look at V13.2 and tell me they "underdelivered". This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world. It's essentially DriveGPT, trained on absolutely massive amounts of training data on the largest GPU super cluster in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeNKYRWGgBc

Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.

First of all, I notice that you didn't take issue with my saying another major hardware revision is due - despite Tesla's constant promises that "we totally can do it with this one bro" for the last 4 revisions.

I have been following closely. 13.2 is a major leap forward. It is VERY impressive.

It's also five years late.

It's got some serious issues, such as intervention rates (which, despite being massively lower, are still too high).

It has trouble in California-style adverse weather conditions. This is largely due to it's vision based sensors.

And by the way, I'm not saying they're not going to "pull it off". I think they're one of the few that will succeed, to be honest. I'm saying that it is nowhere close to where it needs to be to match Tesla's promises.

> This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world.

That is a bold claim, and one that I don't think is true. Tied for first or just second most advanced, I would absolutely believe. And certainly one of the five major players.

It's also missing some key customer service and realtime service components, that took Waymo over 4 years to roll out and fine tune. And Waymo is still having edge case issues!

> Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.

That understates his repeated broken and aggressive promises, often made during investor meetings. It makes it hard to believe his claims about the future.

Well, you seem to have your head screwed on right, but here's my big disconnect: I get that you don't trust what Elon says, he's been wildly optimistic and sometimes misleading. But what does that have to do with objective reality? Would the moon landing had been less impressive if NASA had promised to land on Mars? I don't get why we have to anchor what we find impressive on what Elon promises or predicts. To me that's irrelevant.

As for the most advanced AI driving system, yes you could argue Waymo is more advanced, it's certainly more complex. By most advanced I mean that it's fully end to end, and this is a very new development in AI and robotics (which I work with). It's actually a much simpler architecture than other systems. But as we've seen repeatedly, what tends to win is simple models with a ton of compute and data.

As for V13.2, it won't be perfect, but it's also not the final version. It's approaching feature complete, and we've seen it handle snow covered roads at the very least. Rain hasn't really been a problem for recent versions. In my view, weather is mostly a matter of data collection at this point.

Waymo doesn't have remote divers of any sort.
Maybe they should then, I was blaming humans for the unsafe/illegal right turns and deranged maneuvering in the presence of lights and sirens firetrucks.
Well of course they don’t have remote divers: they don’t operate underwater