When Tesla got rid of radar and switched to "vision only" I cynically assumed it was a way to compensate for supply chain issues rather than radar being as useless as Musk was saying. I still think this is a possibility.
But it is also extremely likely that this is much harder than doing it with radar and lidar added to vision. Since nobody knows how to do any of them yet, you can't expect the company trying to solve the much harder problem to be one of the first to get it.
Their communication is a constant denial of this fact. So they either have no idea what they are doing, or are lying through their teeth.
In fact, when Tesla removed the radar their max-speed with self-driving (or what is it called) dropped from 80mph to 75mph.
What's worse is that they disabled the radar for everybody. How is that not a class action? You're losing features.
Which underappreciates the fact that it is such a hard problem (nature had 500M years to iterate on the reference design) that you want to cheat as hard as possible by giving yourself the best sensor information you can.
But yeah, they need to hit the highest bar possible. As we've seen with vaccines anything developed by humans has to be nearly perfect, while a "natural" massive clusterfuck with 40,000 deaths per year won't count for anything by comparison.
How do you convince the better half of drivers that they should use a system that is worse than themselves, personally?
And I probably should have said "sober, undistracted and competent human" since some people just shouldn't drive, and some people shouldn't be driving under certain conditions (which may not be tired or drunk, but going through a rough break up with late night emotional blowups).
I don't know enough about AI to know if he's right, but it makes some sense to me. I think my biggest issue with it is that human eyes are insanely high quality, able to adapt to huge changes in light levels and clean themselves every few seconds. I know Teslas have issues with cameras being blocked by sunlight and things like that. A human can just move their head and use the sun visor.
With my limited knowledge I think vision probably is the ultimate way forward, but maybe they're too early. Perhaps there's some breakthrough we need to simplify the problem. I don't think Tesla will be the first to start making money from autonomous vehicles. I think Waymo will be the first. LIDAR isn't scalable but it simplifies a big part of the problem to the point that you can generate revenue from autonomous taxis while you train and perfect the general purpose vision model in the long term.
We have an iris, this allows us to limit the amount of light hitting our retina, or increase it when conditions are darker. Do the cameras on a Tesla have shutters that can do this? Otherwise you're going to have fun when there is glare off a wet road.
For that matter, I don't think the cameras installed in Teslas work as well as a good human eye, with dynamic range and depth perception.
So it seems like a bad premise to start with, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak. So many years in, and when they pulled the radar out for supply chain reasons they had to disable self-parking, too.
If drivers always paid good attention, I’m sure we would have fewer collisions. I’m not sure we would have none.
But is there any evidence you need to measure distances? We humans can navigate the world without walking into walls, so long as we're looking where we're going. For a machine to navigate the world it should be possible to do it via vision. And Tesla's do have multiple cameras to be able to measure depth.
And radar is not a backup for cameras. The resolution of the data is terrible and you can not rely on it to do any sort of driving except braking if it thinks there's an obstacle. Radar is also susceptible to problems as well, which is why Tesla's and other cars with radar can often go crazy thinking you're gonna crash randomly.
Yes ... and? Is this guy like an oracle with all the right answers wrt to AI?
You're also appealing to the authority of a guy that didn't deliver much in 4 years and then just left the company. Then after he leaves Tesla brings back the radars lol, but that's definitely a coincidence, right? Because he's Andrek Karpathy, and he was definitely not wrong about that, at all.
He might have a point, he might not. I stated the obvious problems with it in my original comment.
By that argument, we should abandon silicon for our chips, because we think without it. Heck, by that argument, we should be building androids and putting them into the driver's seat, because humans use hands to drive.
What an incredibly stupid argument. My respect for this guy just went right into the toilet.
Evolution has created some of the greatest computational machines. If it was possible to build a programmable biological brain, we'd do it in a heartbeat if that's what it took to develop true artificial general intelligence.
>Heck, by that argument, we should be building androids and putting them into the driver's seat, because humans use hands to drive
Humans don't need to use hands to drive though. We could input steering and throttle controls though many different ways. We have vehicles that are controlled by tilting our bodies in different directions. But the fact of that matter is, that we use vision to see where we're going and the infrastructure is designed for vision.
I'm not sure what your point is, it doesn't seem like you understand his.
Humans also learn social dynamics through numerous other senses and in situations that Tesla's models never encounter or code for. Those other cars on the road do have human drivers, after all.
Humans also have ears, etc.
Plenty of unusual road or lot situations where those things come in handy.