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Comment by kieranmaine | Hacker News Reader

In a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s

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They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.

That's a bold claim. Care to justify it?

Yeah, it only works in extremely controlled environments driving really slowly.

The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.

It doesn't have to be an argument. You know what each system is good at and prioritize inputs accordingly.

Extremely controlled environments like the entire city of San Francisco?

Sensor fusion is a thing. There are no two systems that “argue with each other”. I can’t believe the same old ignorant tropes are still making rounds.

Waymos don’t drive slowly, I don’t know where you’re getting this from. If anything, they drive too fast for a thing without a driver.

Nice, you just outed yourself as being completely clueless. There exist many good sensor fusion techniques for summing the output of disagreeing sensors.

Sounds like bad designs. If you can get rid of something to reduce complexity you absolutely should.

Except when getting rid of something results in a non-working system. Reduced complexity doesn't work as evidenced by Tesla's inability to have a single driverless mile after nearly a decade of development.

Did you forget why the 737 max had 2 crashs ? The alert of the difference between 2 sensors didn't work / wasn't there. So the system was relying on 1 sensor.

Google killing off Waymo by giving them $5.6B just a few weeks ago!

What do they actually use that much money for?

New vehicles and setting up depot operations.

From person experience, the state of the art Tesla vision FSD still can't drive east at sunrise, west at sunset, or in moderate rain. I haven't seen any sign of them solving that fundamental problem with vision, especially given there are existing non-vision solutions.

I find opinions like this to be almost as crazy as saying that the earth is flat because Waymo has a working, truly self-driving taxi service RIGHT FREAKING NOW while Musk is still promising to have one some day in the hazy future while NEVER making a single vehicle that can actually drive without someone in the car. Musk rejecting LIDAR means that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technological challenge of self-driving despite have access to the world's experts OR he is cynically using false promises of self-driving to pump up Tesla share price. I know which one I think is true.

I think anyone who listens to Musk talking about something they themselves know a lot about quickly realises that Musk's skills are elsewhere. He can motivate and market the hell out of a business whilst snorting more ketamine than a herd of horses but he is not a technical genius by any means. He pays people well to agree with him and fires them when they don't, so I suspect that his companies that produce better and more stable products do so because he micromanages them less.

It's weird that what he does is so easy yet no one else is making EVs at scale in USA, or landing rockets, 10 years after SpaceX did it

It doesn't. It has a party trick that works in very specific conditions.

At least it works. Meanwhile Tesla have nothing to show, even in "very specific conditions".

Do you expect a car with fewer sensors to fare any better soon?

But it works vastly better than anything Tesla has made so what does that say about Tesla?

Karpathy said in some podcast that Tela uses LIDAR in training, and by doing this they can get a lot of the benefits. Not sure that all off the "worlds experts" agree with you that you HAVE to use LIDAR. Rate of progress for FSD has been very impressive lately. I personally think that its very plausible that Tesla might beat Waymo to large scale location independent autonomous driving.

The stats on the latest FSD are still terrible. It still needs human intervention far too frequently and is no where near being able to run without a human in the car or Tesla accepting liability for crashes.

> Rate of progress

Waymo's recent experiment with multimodal models and a purely camera based system (EMMA) validate some of the claims that using LIDAR data in training does help. Pretty neat! Still not as good as a LIDAR + RADAR based system.

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