Hacker News Reader

"It's only a matter of time" means nothing. It was only a matter of time in Cesar's age before we got supercomputers and planes.

Tesla is near the bottom of the pack on self-driving tech, with no real hopes of going beyond the level 2 self-driving of FSD, which is objectively worse than just driving yourself. There are already multiple companies with either actual self-driving fleets (e.g. Waymo) or limited use cases of full autonomy with company liability (Mercedes), and many others with working prototypes for one or the other, or even beyond.

Tesla is living in their marketing bubble of "FSD robotaxis next year now", where they have been living since 2018 or earlier, while the rest of the pack barely even sees them in the rear view mirror.

you're so wrong. do more research. Driving on a geo-fenced area is much much simple than what Tesla is trying. Eventually they can do that as well without problems if they can't generalise.

You do realise that waymo doesn't have drivers in their cars anymore? How about you do research on Tesla's competitors? Having a driver intervene is several orders of magnitude less advanced. Easily more than a decade away from the goal of self driving.

You can build a geofenced area that spans every single road in the USA so the fact that something is geofenced tells you absolutely nothing.

Sure, but "we're trying something harder" doesn't mean anything. Waymo is succeeding at a well defined, useful form of driverless tech. They will probably be able to extend this, maybe slowly, to more and more cities.

Tesla is failing at everything they're promising, and not delivering anything useful along the way (FSD as it exists today is more dangerous and more demanding than regular driving).

You're comparing a warehouse to a train even talking about Waymo.

FSD has no limit. Recently it has been tested around in Europe and Asia, and the existing tech basically "just works" because sensorily and thought-wise it's made to function like the common meatbag between the seat and the wheel, just better.

No, making the skyscraper 100 meters higher isn't going to make the train less relevant even though the tracks aren't all built yet.

Again, FSD is just not doing anything that interesting. It only handles the easy scenarios, and punts to a driver for everything else, at a moment's notice. And it still constantly fails, per everyone who tries it, in even very simple situations. Look at what this article author found: that's just not something that happens with Waymo or Mercedes.

You're pretty much exactly 180 degrees in the wrong in that one. Due to the deep NN-based approach, FSD can react to the minutest of changes like seeing ahead of the car in front, or even hand signals by pedestrians to decide how to drive.

Again, even mentioning Waymo here proves you don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about. Might as well compare FSD to trains, trains also "steer themselves" lol

The hardest parts of self driving are related to interacting with others on the road - other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, animals, debris etc. Waymo has mostly solved these problems, in a real environment, with only some simple limitations in top speed (and a major limitation for climate - they don't work in heavy rain, fog, snow, etc). Sure, the environment is fully mapped out, so it's not easy to scale their solution. But they've solved an extremely difficult problem extremely well, with some well defined constraints.

FSD has no defined constraints, sure. But it is FAR from solving the problems that Waymo has solved, and far from solving the problems that the CEO has promised to solve. If you hacked a Tesla to run with FSD without a driver in the car and let it roam in real traffic, even in Phoenix, it will crash within the first 100km. It's very, very far from being able to safely work without human intervention.

And NNs are inherently very noisy, so they are not a promising approach for a safety critical system. Combining that with pure camera vision, which is very limited even in animals that have literally had billions of years of training, is a fool's errand. FSD as it exists right now does not work, and will never work. Time will show this: Tesla will either give FSD up, or will switch to camera+LIDAR.

"Trains have solved the problems FSD is struggling with. They deal with junctions with automated signposts, and have a well established architecture of also avoiding train-to-train-crashes."

Your example just demonstrates my point. Waymo is not comparable because their "solution" is a dead end while FSD basically just works when being demonstrated in Europe and Asia even though it likely has like 0.1% or less of kilometers of having been driven there when comparing to US.

>it will crash

Just not true. Even ignoring that FSD can often go way longer without an intervention, remember, the "interventions" are extremely subjective and are just done when the driver becomes uncomfortable for reason or another. Many times likely the intervention just makes the car less safe in the situation, and the driver does it simply because they just had a different idea of how to fit a gap and were surprised by the car's plan. But the intervention logic is there to case for a ton of angles including legal and bug reporting / "feeling" safe instead of just purely _being_ safe.

>And NNs are inherently very noisy, so they are not a promising approach for a safety critical system

We're just replacing an NN with another one that is better. Replacing our transit system with something more mechanical akin to automatic train signaling systems (and getting rid of roads and cars!) isn't really in the books so blaming NN's is a moot point. Talking about LIDAR verifies that you don't actually have understanding of the history of FSD-like systems. LIDAR is easier for a beginner dev operation to start with but won't scale and is a fools errand given we already have the bloody reference of the previous control system working purely with vision!

FSD is the long term future and without comparison. Elon having been over optimistic about the timeline doesn't make it any less world-changing.

"near the bottom of the pack"

Are you _trying_ to make people not take you seriously? No one has the kind of tech Tesla unveiled back at Autonomy day, which is still state of the art technology wise. 100w for that much NN compute was a genius move to manage to get the talent in to build and to get early. Now that they've had more time to develop the tech, FSD is looking better than ever and in a few years Tesla will be licensing this around for a pretty penny. Eventually governments might even mandate it considering the comparative danger of human drivers.

No, I'm looking at actual results, not the tech stack. They are the only company that is only attempting Level 2, all the others are targeting or have achieved Level 3, or above. And Tesla isn't even doing Level 2 well, from the limited data that we have (since they of course refuse to release more). Look at any video about FSD on the internet and you'll see very frequent, inexplicable errors, in common simple scenarios.

A train can also run entirely automated but it is as valid a competitor to FSD as anything you have mentioned because FSD is general and works like a human. Video to inputs

Trains most certainly do not run automated, not on any long distance route anyway (there are some city trains/trams that do). And again, I'm comparing results. Waymo works autonomously quite well, even though geolocked to a city. Its going to be far easier for Waymo to take their existing mastery of traffic and extend that to less well mapped areas than it is going to be for Tesla to take their lack of mastery of any aspect of self driving tech and extend it to actually working.

What exactly do you think geolocking does to simplify the problem of self-driving so much?

Your example about trains is actually incorrect, not just in that most trains are "basically" automated, but in that some (long-distance) have actually been for a long time.

>Its going to be far easier for Waymo to take their existing mastery of traffi

I'm going to stop you right there. The whole comparison is theoretical, and I just realized you don't even understand they are in entirely different markets and are trying to make a concrete point. FSD is for customers but Waymo isn't man. Good day

> Saying that it will "never" work is myopic.

The implication is that Tesla can't make it work. In the same way that Meta are unlikley to make AR glasses a "thing".

> As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don't have FSD yet) I cannot wait to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a "copilot" do some of the "thinking" & driving for me.

depending on which country you are in, you'll be on the hook for any mistakes.

> It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ...

This is the fallacy of statistics. Its probably better/similar performance than humans in 80% of cases. The problem is, it performs significantly worse when it fails. It does not fail safe. Thats the really hard part.

I also question the wisdom of using unverified recordings of average drivers to train on. Unless you know how go they are, you're going to be feeding really bad behaviours into the model.

If people are already using FSD (supervised) on a daily basis, it's working. It's not "Level 5" yet, but they don't claim it is. Totally agree that the "Full Self Driving" name is marketing BS. What should they call it instead? "Kinda Works Autonomous Driving, Please Pay Attention" ... ;-)

I really hope this will not been available in a long time in Europe. I don't want to be part of musk's irresponsible beta testing plan as someone who lives around tesla cars. I also really hope that there will be a point based drivers licence similar to human ones that applies to those technologies before this kind of experiment is started. If it loses its points, the whole system has to be disabled and having to go through a audit/licence process to be allowed on public roads again.

"With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control. Forget about just being focused, you need to be hyper-focused"

Driving with FSD on seems to be more stressful than just driving.

Driving with FSD in mid to moderate traffic is more stressful. Usually drop fsd to AP.

Driving with FSD on empty roads is very enjoyable and whenever it decides to do something you can recover/correct with no stress.

Driving in poor conditions with FSD feels safer, it sees better than me in the dark and rain for sure.

Driving with fsd in heavy traffic about the same as driving a car yourself, this where I usually drop back to AP.

Is driving my tesla easier or harder than another vehicle? It’s much much easier than driving my ICE suv. But from a pure FSD perspective, if the car didn’t have AP I believe my opinion would not be the same.

> It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ...

I heard that argument for many years for many deep learning applications of significant value. Any day now, right?

I remember using Text OCR and Voice recognition in the 90's. It was like 90% there, it seemed like we were just a few years away from it working perfectly.

Almost 30 years later, OCR and voice recognition, now backed by machine learning, is far more impressive than it was back then, but it still keeps making mistakes that I have to fix. And those are far, far easier problems than driving.

I wonder if the rules of continuous improvement apply to ML models. It seems that regressions are very easy to pick up. And that with a complex task like FSD it is virtually impossible to use the established tools to safeguard the stack from regressions (i.e. test cases that assert some unbroken functionality).

> In December 2015, Musk predicted that "complete autonomy" would be implemented by 2018. At the end of 2016, Tesla expected to demonstrate full autonomy by the end of 2017, and in April 2017, Musk predicted that in around two years, drivers would be able to sleep in their vehicle while it drives itself. In 2018 Tesla revised the date to demonstrate full autonomy to be by the end of 2019.

And this goes on for a bit longer up to the present day.

After close to a decade of failed promise again and again and again I think we can safely dismiss the "perhaps a bit too optimistic" good-faith defence.

But hey, maybe this time it's just around the corner, cross my heart hope to die. And maybe the rapture will be upon us next year like that guy is preaching on the street corner (for real this time – last chance to repent sinners!)

> The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works

And I don't think that you understand it either. In the real world, all exponentials are just the early part of an s-curve. Everything has limits, reaches diminishing returns and tops out.

If a technique is already topping out, there won't be great leaps in performance without fundamental changes. An incremental "update" won't do it at that point in the curve.

You can pick examples from several hyped technologies today that are going to work properly and change the world "real soon now".