Am just curious, why does everyone believe that Waymo is way ahead. They have more miles driven, but so does Tesla. Waymo has some incredible guys going after autonomy but they have nothing to show as of yet at the L4 or L5 level. Is it because they are playing it super safe. They don't have any urgency to make money from autonomy unlike Tesla. Are they taking it easy ?
Per my understanding, Tesla is tackling autonomy purely based on supervised learning. Waymo probably has something else, semi-supervised or unsupervised, where they collect data from a small geo-fenced area and can extrapolate that to the real world. I don't know.
First, it seems that everyone but Musk is claiming so, so either everyone else is wrong, or Musk is wrong. I find it far more likely that this is just another "funding secured" type of claim, than an actual win. Case in point: see this evaluation [1] from only a year ago, where Tesla was ranked 19 out of 19 (Waymo was #1).
And the timing of the announcement, only two days before delivering really bad financial news... well, see the previous comment.
You provided the second reason yourself: Waymo has some incredible guys going after autonomy, and they've been doing that for a decade now. So whatever shortcut the Tesla people claim to have found, it's (a) either a shortcut nobody else has thought of before, or it's (b) they have thought of it before, and ruled it out. I believe (b) to be far more likely, hence I believe them to be on the wrong path.
Also, contrary to what you say, they do have something to show as of yet. They are operating hundreds of autonomous vehicles in Phoenix.
And yes, they are probably playing it super safe, but that's exactly what you should expect from someone accelerating 1+ tons of metal to lethal speeds, and giving it autonomy.
Playing it super safe is the only way to go. Any kind of autonomy has to be done that way because if it isn't we'll see a re-run of the 'AI-winter' only this time it will be called the self driving car winter, Tesla is at risk of setting back the self driving movement a decade or more if they do not get their house in order and start treating this as if lives are in the balance.
Do you have an even worse source? This Navigant « study » keeps coming up in comments about Tesla without any explanation on the methodology whatsoever.
This is one of those "you need to be an expert to evaluate the claim" problems.
Talk to anyone with research experience who are building world scale ML systems that are used by real people, and it's unambiguous that Elon Musk is a con man.
It comes down to small details, like the nature of the training data, the nature of the customizations, the nature of the business problems, the nature of the regulatory problems, the difference between highway driving and city driving. The enormous amount of special casing, the nature of the QA infrastructure, the capital on hand, the routing and mapping problems...
What Tesla has is a decent lane finding system. What Google has is an end to end system. It won't take them long to expand to all the major cities; solving the geofencing problem is easy, they already made street view.
And they were doing L4 successfully years ago. They're keeping drivers in the cars right now mostly because something going wrong is a PR risk, not because they need them. And L5 isn't a particularly important goal.
My guess is I'd have to write up 20 pages of detailed analysis at minimum to convince folks. In general if you don't have 5 to 10 years in depth experience in this space, you probably shouldn't consider qualified to have an opinion.
Appeal-to-authority arguments are always uncompelling, but they are especially uncompelling against Musk. Authorities said hydrogen fuel cells were the future. Authorities said EVs will never outperform gas cars. Authorities said batteries will always cost too much. Authorities said reusing rockets will never work.
With each of these breakthroughs, Musk presented a well-reasoned view that was highly contrarian against the authority consensus; and in each case, his view turned out to be not only correct, but so correct that it became the new authority consensus.
Maybe this time he is wrong and you are right. But if you are wondering why the market and the masses believe him, it's because he continues to provide reasonable explanations for what he's proposing, and he has a track record to back them up. If history predicts the future, then in a few years, we'll add "authorities said you needed LIDAR for self-driving" to the list above. This is already starting to play out in the SDC space, with Hotz of Comma.ai sharing Musk's views on vision, and Levandowski sharing his more generalized concern about LIDAR (the latter is more recent if you're not familiar):
> Levandowski contends that this “race” to deploy autonomous vehicles has yet to start in earnest largely due to shortcomings from “crutch technologies,” a descriptor he uses for hardware like LiDAR and HD maps. His position is that while these provide sensing and localization for the vehicle in the present moment, they have serious compromises and don’t produce the level of predictive ability required to commercially deploy autonomous vehicles.
Karpathy was able to explain in very simple and understandable terms this week why Tesla's approach is advantageous. If the critics understand this domain so well, how come they can't provide a straightforward retort? If Feinman could do it with quantum physics, surely a machine learning expert can do it with neural networks. I would love to read/hear/watch such a retort if anybody is interested in presenting one.
I'm not saying that Musk has solved fsd or that he will in the near future, but if you asked anyone with experience building cell phones in 2006 if the iPhone was possible they would have said absolutely not. Technological progress is inherently unpredictable even for experts. Musk has some really good people working for him and their datasets get bigger every day, I wouldn't rule Tesla out just yet.
Their datasets aren't useful for the problems that make driving hard. Musk is making claims which are paper thin false. If he weren't making these kinds of claims I'd take him more seriously. I promise you that the reasons this is ludicrous are extremely solid.
Edit: fwiw I've actually taken a look at a number of waymos internal systems, and sat down with people who worked on autopilot.
If Tesla doesn’t have the right training data then no one does. Tesla has both simulations and vast amounts of real world data from cars all over the world. Extracting depth maps from 2d images is a solved problem, which negates the need for Lidar. Best I can tell Tesla is the closest out of everyone to solving self driving. I don’t think they’ll solve it by next year, but If I had to guess I’d say 2.5 to 3 years from now Tesla will have relatively safe self driving cars.
Waymo is a technology demo, not a functioning operation that spits out self driving cars by the tens of thousands per quarter. They are many years away from having that. That's fine if they pull it off; it's the way big technology startups are funded. Alphabet is playing the long game here.
However, Tesla is talking about making the tens of thousands cars they are shipping per quarter right now autonomous. We'll see how far they get with this. My guess is that the game for the next five years is going to be convincing regulators that these things are safe enough to allow on the road. Having a lot of cars on the road already will help their argument. Waymo has the same problem but all they can point too is some limited areas in the US where they are driving currently.
Tesla seems to be improving their current products continuously through software updates as well. This adds to their sales pitch: your car will gain capabilities and may even become fully autonomous one day. They've been riding this pitch for years and while they have under-delivered on the end goal, the in between milestones seem pretty interesting.
> Waymo is a technology demo, not a functioning operation that spits out self driving cars by the tens of thousands per quarter.
Tesla doesn't spit out full self-driving cars in any number in any quarter, while Waymo is actually operating FSD cars in a limited, but public and commercial, role. So Tesla is still behind.
> However, Tesla is talking about making the tens of thousands cars they are shipping per quarter right now autonomous.
Yes, if one was looking for the industry leader in talking about delivering full self-driving, Tesla would be much more clearly competitive than they are in actually delivering. But talk is cheap.
If waymo has developed tech for autonomous cars then integration into existing car brands is not going to take a miracle, hell retrofitting onto my 96 cherokee isn't out of the question.
Per my understanding, Tesla is tackling autonomy purely based on supervised learning. Waymo probably has something else, semi-supervised or unsupervised, where they collect data from a small geo-fenced area and can extrapolate that to the real world. I don't know.