I cannot believe that smart people still repeat that argument.
Until you have something like the human brain powering the car you cannot just use "two eyes"
Until you have something like the human brain powering the car you cannot just use "two eyes"
That means the only thing we know can work is eyes + brain.
The answer to your question is: we don't know what's needed, so people saying "sorry you need LIDAR for FSD" is much more "drank the coolaid" than my stance of "we don't know, maybe no LIDAR + lots of training data can work just fine". Or, turn the question on its head – how much better at driving do you think humans would be if we had LIDAR on top of our heads? My guess is... not very. Hence my belief that the Tesla approach (less SOTA sensing, more training data) is a reasonable one.
You've still got things a bit mixed up. My stance does not imply that a computer functions as well as a human brain. I am not claiming that better sensors won't (eventually) give you better results. My stance merely implies that the brain (digital or wet) is a very important part of the equation, and just throwing sensors at the problem won't fix the fundamental need to have a highly sophisticated ML system running the show, and it's easier to get the training data you need for such a system if you're not using LIDAR.
“Less data is better for self-driving cars” is not the take I expected to hear from the Tesla mob today.
Tesla is clearly gathering more data for their self-driving program than Waymo, due almost entirely to the fact that the Tesla sensing package does not require installing LIDAR on every car.