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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that an academic conference now feels like a marketing op for industrial research labs more than anything. His claims about how accurate their vision system is and how it is exceeding other sensors is not verifiable in any way to the public. Given how well qualified he is I am sure he is not wrong! Andrej is brilliant. But this is an academic conference right? This isn't open science, it's a discussion about an engineered system. I'm afraid this is the future of ML research (which CV is so heavily dependent on now). Long gone are the days of reading a paper and understanding the approach. Now you need the data and model which may not even be computationally feasible without millions of dollars in hardware. This isn't Tesla's fault or anything, it just makes me sad.

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In the talk, he gave clear examples with detailed position + velocity graphs where the vision system detected obstacles sooner and with less jitter than the radar system. Specifically the overpass where radar triggers erroneous braking, and the pulled over truck where radar detects the obstacle significantly slower.

That's a strawman. No one is looking to build FSD with radar sensors that have shipped on cars for 20 years now for things like adaptive cruise control. LIDAR is what vision only is compared to.

Radar is the technology that is actually shipping in millions of cars. Lidar is future tech that is not practically to deploy in millions of cars as of now.

There is absolutely 0 chance they could just 'put in lidar' from now on so for what he has to do its not relevant.

When was last time you looked at LIDAR tech? It's already cheap enough that it can be easily deployed in millions of cars.

Hi-def 360 LIDAR that companies like Waymo or Aurora are absolutely not ready to put into millions of vehicles for a price that makes it anywhere close to reasonable.

Multiple companies that have announced Lidar have later removed it for the cars.

The Lidar that are actually currently deployed that you can 'just' get from suppliers is of the not of the same quality and we have yet to actually see real high volume cars with 360 Lidar on any true mass market car.

Elon Musk is a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. I'd be willing to bet that Tesla continuously looks at the state of LIDAR tech and evaluates whether it's at the point where it will be feasible to put it in a mass-market car in two years.

People keep getting hung up on their vision strategy because it sharply diverges from that of all other players, but it's really just tackling the "no one knows how to do this and no one really tries" part of the problem first.

No level 5 autonomous driving system will ever ship without really good computer vision.

Tesla cannot go into LIDAR without huge destruction of the company valuation and pissing off large base of customers. They've been selling a car ready for FSD for almost 5 years now, for a huge extra margin. LIDAR retrofit is impossible, and admitting that they need it means there's huge amount of customers who paid for product that will never exists. Refunds will not only put a huge dent on finance, but it'll also further damage brand of Tesla as a player in that space, and Elon as a god-like visionary.

Is LIDAR required for self driving? Probably, but it's not certain. But one thing is certain - Tesla is in the corner, and they have to deliver solution without it, using few years old inference HW and 5 years old+ cameras. Selling HW for a problem that doesn't even have a theoretical solution in software, so you don't even know what HW you need, is a bold, bold move.

It is a bold move, but perhaps we need more of those. How much of the talent in SV is focused on optimizing ad placement or building messaging systems?

1. Radar isn't gold standard of object detection. LIDAR is. 2. From reports by owners of latest Teslas, that don't even have radar installed, they still have erroneous braking. Driving is hard.

and yet cars with radar based collision avoidance dont end up decapitating people, or plowing into parked cop cars.

I believe the teslas involved in those collisions were versions that were using radar.

The talk wasn't part of the main conference but it was part of a workshop, which was just one out of tons of workshops.

http://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/workshops-schedule

Thanks for pointing this out, the distinction wasn't obvious from the linked video - that makes a lot more sense. I haven't been to CVPR since 2014 so it has been a while.

From what I have been able to tell recently, CVPR in particular is a venue where "engineered systems" get a lot of focus. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, nor do I think it is representative of the big ML conferences in general.

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