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Comment by bluepanda928752 | Hacker News Reader

I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer car

However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla can't really change their stance on this without admitting that FSD options they already sold would not actually become FSD within the lifetimes of these vehicles. I suspect this might also be the reason why Karpathy looks more and more nervous with each new talk

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> FSD options they already sold would not actually become FSD within the lifetimes of these vehicles

That's pretty much a given at this point but they will not admit it until a class-action lawsuit forces them to.

But we might actually get a functioning Mars base out of this since that's where Musk will be hiding when the FTC finally wakes up /s

>100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work

you don't need 100%, and even humans are far from 100% (500Mpx resolution of our eyes allows to basically sheer brute force through it in many cases). The stereo setup provides great and fast estimation with several megapixel resolution with good fps (way better than lidar) for majority of situations. It is some share of the [part of the] scenes, and you really know it right then and there, where you need AI and/or very sophisticated compute heavy algorithms. So instead of throwing AI and the compute power at those parts, you just pull the points from the lidar (and even radar if the things are that bad) covering that segment. And that way, given a couple more iterations of sensors (from current 20Mpx+ to the hundreds Mpx) and compute, it will be doing even better than humans. Anybody not doing sensor fusion would be a loser though - just like going into a fist fight with one hand intentionally disabled.

Is it something that can be retrofitted on existing models?

LIDARs unlikely since they require a line of sight forwards, backwards and possibly on the sides of the vehicle

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