Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Safety-driver miles are more useful for training.

Waymo does most of its training in simulation. They do 20+ million miles of simulation every single day with 25,000 "virtual" vehicles. They don't even have to put out many cars for training.

> Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade.

I've got a bridge to sell you if you think driving in SF is easy or that Waymo is only doing it in the easiest situations. They cover the entire city 24/7, and in rain and fog.

> Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere.

And they won't because maps are clearly a big part of their tech stack and they've found a way to efficiently maintain them. That's what gives them the confidence a.k.a reliability to remove the driver.

> You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope.

So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today. Community trackers (absence of Tesla sharing data) show Tesla's intervention rate hasn't really improved much at all and they still seem to make extremely basic mistakes. So the formula clearly isn't working as of today.

Tesla has simulations too, of course. Thing is, the world has fractal complexity and synthetic data only captures the variation that you tell it about. Simulations for synthetic data generation are literally my job -- this is where my intuition is at its strongest.

> if you think driving in SF is easy

I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.

> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.

That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?

> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.

FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.

I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.

> I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring.

Then explain to me why it can’t stop for stop signs in SF or can’t drive in a straight line without swerving onto oncoming traffic. Surely, they have a lot of data from the city with their large fleet? Either the data is helping or it’s not.

> That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?

Yes, with a driver. And still with poor intervention rates after years of development. What’s Tesla’s timetable for getting their reliability up and removing the driver? That’s really the ballgame in self driving.

> FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time.

“Works everywhere” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when you rely on a driver to prevent crashes. Literally does not pass the true test of self driving.

It took Waymo 10 years to completely remove the driver. Now they’re announcing new cities and capabilities constantly, with freeways coming soon. Let’s see how many “rewrites” it takes for Tesla to tell drivers not to pay attention, let alone completely removing them. I wish them luck (as a Model 3 owner), but they’re working with their hands tied behind their backs on this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com