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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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".

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

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

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