[tcoff91]

Their decision to entirely rely on computer vision seems unwise

[smallmancontrov]

Their decision to rely on vision got them billions of miles of training data from every corner of the USA. It did not get them point clouds, but monocular depth estimation works extremely well these days, so would it really have been that valuable? It looks to me like they made a shrewd bet and won big.

[seanmcdirmid]

They didn’t count on LIDAR falling in price so rapidly with their bet.

[smallmancontrov]

The cameras that collected those billions of miles of data were installed up to 10 years ago. You can't teleport today's LIDAR prices into the past.

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes, but it’s pretty easy to drive a car around with a LiDAR unit, you can couple it with Google maps data collection.

[smallmancontrov]

They didn't drive around a collection car, they had their customers drive millions of collection cars for billions of miles.

[tantalor]

"LiDAR is gay"

- Elon, probably

[CamperBob2]

Next up from Musk: "Cameras are unreliable, and radar is woke. The Force is all you need."

[Smoosh]

“acoustic environment sensing”

[trainsarebetter]

Short term, perhaps, long term they might end up with a more generalized robot operating system. It’s definitely more flexible

[gonzo41]

Seems like a mistake not to be a sensor maximalist. Why not try and get as many data streams onboard as possible. Seems like the generalized robot OS would be better if it was a data fusion platform.

[trainsarebetter]

That’s a good point. I coming from the perspective that waymo is more of a “dead reckoning” approach compared to Tesla long(and maybe never ending) road.