I feel like this will be a never-ending battle with a camera-based system. There will always be some visual situation not seen before. Shouldn't the default behavior be to slow/stop or throw up its metaphorical hands and release control back to the driver?
People wouldn't buy a car that slows down occasionally because they'd accept it would happen to they and they'd find it annoying. They'd happily buy a car that randomly kills people because they'd tell themselves it's only happen to other people.
At some point new buyers attitude will change from "this will never happen to _me_" to "shit, this happens all the time".
Also Robotaxi customers might complain more - or sue - compared to Tesla owners.
I don't think he conflates those things in his own mind, only in his rhetoric. In other words, I think that Musk lies when it suits his purposes.
It’s a charisma that convinces other people of what’s true. Elon has that, that’s why said hard on exists. He often turns out to be right.
If you think it isn't lies, then you accept he's not very intelligent or at least illogical.
The simplest answer is he's voicing his ultimate vision for a product without basis in reality like the solar powered roadster, robotaxis, etx.
It's marketing and the result is the same whether he lies or not, only distinction is if he's mentally handicapped or dishonest.
I do not think he’s always truthful by any means. But a failed prediction is not a lie. as the great George Costanza once said, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
It's marketing. You're making things very complicated and distorting reality.
Not all that many.
He’s always overly-optimistic about cost and timeline and he’s got a whole host of issues due to his mental illness but the dude did do several extremely impressive things that nobody thought would happen.
Compared to what he has accomplished you can understand how “a car can drive itself without LIDAR” seems easily believable. It may be wrong, but it’s not as hard to imagine as Starlink was ten years ago.
Or delusional.
I think he's a smart guy. I don't think he's remotely as smart as he thinks he is, but smart nonetheless. So calling him a willful liar is, in my view, giving him the benefit of the doubt because the other explanations are even worse.
This is going to bite him in the ass w.r.t. Starship, too: Rapid reusability, return to launch site, and in orbit refueling are just the major aspects of a dependency hairball in Starship. Either it all works, or none of it works well enough to actually be more efficient than a non-reusable second stage.
It's not technically impossible to solve. Humans drive with vision, audio, and balance inputs, so in extremis if you want a self-driving car you can hire a chauffeur.
However, no matter how easy or difficult it is to drive with vision alone, more data is better: driving with vision plus lidar will be easier.
Tesla's mistake seems to be relentless optimism. If self driving were simple, then it'd be here today and the market would be competing on how to add it to cars with minimal additional cost. There, the data-light method would have an advantage. Yet self-driving is not in fact here, and for equal capital investments a company like Waymo using sensor fusion will probably get there before Tesla.
(Other advantages, such as "never gets drunk, tired, or distracted" would still apply, but are not necessarily sufficient).
And they also make mistakes. Human driving is "impossible to solve" too. And it's not even about experience and individual abilities. Visual illusions can happen to anyone if they're unlucky - one night I had to convince myself to drive "into the wall", because my brain decided the hole under a bridge was a wall and the bridge was empty space due to colours being just right. You can't avoid that whether the driving system is software or wetware.
a self driving (or even self-stopping/accident avoidant) car does not remember it didn't see any signs saying road closure, it can only go off what is in front of it.
whenever i watch the videos of the FSD screen in traffic, you see things popping in and out of existence. This, to me, is why "FSD" cannot be better than a human, even with advanced sensors. Maybe if all cars were networked, but guess what, i will never own one, i'll buy old cars until they outlaw it, and then i'll probably sit in my house and wait to die. But until "non-network equipped cars are banned nationwide for any purpose" what do you propose?
Also this was on the front page on my phone's app, but it wasn't on the first 5 pages on the website - is this whitewashing by someone at HN or what?
There is Gaussian splatting now. That seems fast enough for real-time, and would provide all that you need for this. If enough Gaussians are about to hit the windshield, slow the f* down.
If I remember right it was lidar overriding the camera as the set up when Tesla was using lidar...
Look at what he did at twitter. As soon as he was put in charge he removed all safety measures to save money and now twitter is full of bots and scammers. Why do people assume he runs Tesla any differently??
Tesla is selling a driver assisted system that can't reliably turn the car or park it without manual intervention a decent percent of the time.
Plus with LIDAR being an active system you're more likely to see nothing or garbage where the ground and a road is supposed to be. Good idea to stop if there's a hole in reality!
With camera+AI it's the opposite. For too many things AI won't really know what they are - it's mainly looking for things that it does recognize. With unclassified pixels everywhere, of course the default is to ignore what it doesn't understand, otherwise the system would never work. You can see this with the Tesla happily driving through some unrecognized pixels.
LIDAR-based systems can operate without having to unsafely ignore things that they can't account for or that don't make sense.
Merging a camera with a camera, and a camera with a completely different kind of a sensor cannot be "the same problem". It's absurd.