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Waymo Robotaxis Are Giving 100,000 Rides a Week. It'll Soon Be More.
(singularityhub.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can someone explain like I'm five how Waymo has robitaxis without drivers behind the wheel and automated driving such as that offered by Tesla is not yet able to do the same?
Is it just that Waymo has mapped a small area really, really well? What's the difference? Why is Tesla so bad at it but Waymo is able to do it?
Humans can drive with just vision.
Tesla is doing it the hard way. Their model involves cars just having vision and driving the same as humans do. Humans can do it, why can't computers? Seeing as they have more cameras than 2. In theory they should be better than human drivers. Once it is solved they could instantly drive anywhere humans can.
Waymo has taken an easier route and they have used a lot of detailed mapping with also an assortment of additional sensors. Waymo doing it the easy way has only recently achieved this. Turns out it's really hard. Harder than everyone including the experts expected probably.
But with advances in computing and things like LLM's Tesla is catching up. Who knows how long that will take though? I always thought waymo was doing the right thing so I'm biased.
Edit: this fucking website I swear. I answered the question and got downvoted for it. What more you people want from me?
Not only that, but as far as I know, other companies are still relying on human-written code, whereas Tesla has gone with neural nets. If it turns out that manually coding how to handle every possible variation of traffic scenarios is an impossible task, those companies would essentially have to start from scratch, giving Tesla a massive lead for adopting AI so much earlier. Of course, it’s a gamble, things could go the other way too, but considering the leap FSD made from version 1.3 to 1.4, when they switched to neural nets, I’m rather confident they're on the right track.
An undeterministic system is dangerous. A deterministic with flaws can be better, the flaws can be identified understood and corrected. The flaws are more likely to be present in testing.
Machine learning is nearly always going to be undeterministic. If they then use continuous training, the situation only gets worse.
If you use machine learning because you can’t understand how to solve the problem, then you’ll never understand how the system works. You’ll never be able to pass a basic inspection test.