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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Not clear. Waymo has made it work, but cost per car and per ride is still very high. That should come down over time. It's not clear that this is a hugely profitable business. It's basically auto rental and taxi service, after all.

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The way I see it is what Waymo + others (and even Tesla until last year pre v12) was the same as someone doing ChatGPT but not with generative transformers but with if statements. If user asks what is that, say this, etc.

And now Tesla changed the game completely and moved to a 100% NN based system which indeed requires huge amounts of data which they're the only who actually have. All the other companies have no chance of getting that unless they fit their cars with thousands of dollars of gear for free (because I think no one would pay extra to get it and they really need it in ALL cars).

So it's probably not a good idea in terms of monopoly, but I think it will be Tesla FSD that gets integrated in all the other brands.

Because I would want to put a NN as unreliable as GPT4 in control of my car ... They are struggling to put in guardrails and make it politically correct with text.

I guess AI truly is the new crypto because I'm seeing all the same hype patterns. And Tesla is always riding the wave.

I've heard from several folks working on self driving outside of Tesla that they're very concerned about how cavalier Tesla is being about safety. I recall hearing one story about an engineer who outright refused to ride in a Tesla with FSD enabled. All anecdotal, sure, but I've become very skeptical of Tesla's approach.

> They are struggling to put in guardrails and make it politically correct with text.

Are they? It’s quite hard to get politically incorrect outputs from ChatGPT nowadays.

How many things does it not talk about? One of the challenges of self-driving is that it has to fail safely so they have to handle all of these uncommon situations a chatbot can just give up on.

because waymo relies on a continuous mapping of the cities you can take it. that's why it is available in few US cities, but this does not scale at all. The point of those startups (and tesla's) is to produce something that can drive everywhere whitout prior information (fantasy world right now)

As far as the scaling, I think some would have said the same about Google Street View, but now the majority of streets in the country are mapped out. Google already has the infrastructure to be able to do the necessary mapping. And as Waymo cars become more common, I suspect they'll be able to fill in a lot of the gaps.

street view has images from years ago depending on where the google cars are mapping in that moment, waymo needs constant mapping of the cities it has cars in, therefore needing more man-hours. furthermore the driving laws differs from country to country, and in most of the world the road paint/signs are borderline indescifrable for a human, let alone a machine. i'm not saying that it can't be done, but it is already expensive in big US cities, it just do not scale well.

It's not at all clear why that wouldn't scale, could you elaborate? Legitimately not being snarky. The existence of Google Street View seems to be a fairly strong counterpoint.

> The point of those startups (and tesla's) is to produce something that can drive everywhere whitout prior information

Nope. The point is to make asstons of money. One does not need to achieve this silly ideal in order to do so.

This argument keeps coming up, mostly from Tesla fans. Google does collect a lot of data, but it uses it mostly for two things: 1) location with loss of or errors in GPS info, and 2) street maps of where to go. The driving environment is too dynamic for static info to be useful for more than that.

Driving in static environments with GPS, maps and LIDAR worked two decades ago, after all. The hard problems involve the other players.

Yes, Musk is saying that Tesla will have robot taxis by August 2024.[1] He said that back in 2021, too.[2] And in 2016.[3]

Tesla vs bollard: [4] Tesla still has only a not-very-good level 2 system.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-robo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vZ8eWBiWFE

[3] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4682448-tesla-sudden-third-...

[4] https://twitter.com/WorldBollard/status/1585626430154502145

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