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Comment by hi-im-mi-ih | Hacker News Reader

You make some great points here. However, isn't 27 vehicles small potatoes? Tesla has almost 500,000 cars on the road and it also has 5 billion miles driven. That's a lot of training data. The approach to self-driving cars is largely training a model, so the data from 27 cars is actually extremely underwhelming.

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27 cars is a start. In terms of fleet size, Waymo, Uber and Cruise each have about 200 test vehicles on the road, gathering in the ballpark of 4 terabytes of data per hour, and they currently have $150k or more of sensor+compute hardware on each vehicle, they use high definition 3D maps and are focused on validating their software to function safely within limited, geo-fenced areas; a realistic objective.

If Tesla were serious about developing an autonomous OS they would need to take a similar approach, but since all they're trying to do is summon the demon they can get away with a pentagram, a 3 horned goat, a copy of the necrinomocon and some candles.

since all they're trying to do is summon the demon they can get away with a pentagram, a 3 horned goat, a copy of the necrinomocon and some candles.

Any human sacrifice in there?

  Any human sacrifice in there?

Probably not until the next recession.

What about Joshua Brown?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-12/tesla-pro...

Those Tesla cars aren't collecting training data, that's preposterous. They have a mobile phone connection and some flash storage, so where is all this data going to?

It's not going over the mobile link, you would need many magnitudes the bandwidth, and it's certainly not going on the flash storage, because if you continuously stream raw camera data to flash you will kill it in a year at most.

(That is before you consider that you want a $100k sensor suite with lidar, precise wheel odometry and a GPS/INS system to get a ground truth for training anything)

Hmm, I have not considered how they're retrieving driving data. I'm sure they're getting that data back somehow. It's a lot of data to waste.

That’s incorrect. Tesla’s connect to home WiFi and use that to transmit large volumes of training data. Owners have tracker huge packets being moved via their home connection

Tesla doesn’t have 500K cars. I believe they have sold close to 150k cars till date. But your point remains valid. That is a lot of data compared to 27 cars

I had VIN #150,000 18 months ago, and they crossed 200,000 in May 2017 so it’s likely sitting at just shy of 300,000 right now. The 150k figure you are citing is US only (where there is a race to 200k when the federal credit expires).

You are correct. I was thinking US numbers due to the focus on Fed credit

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