Didn't they need the data from the 200 million miles or so from actual driving before they could get to the generative model though? Data isn't everything, as you point out with Telsa (mainly because they decided to forego using lidar it would seem), but it is pretty fundamental.

Yeah I'm not so sure this CTO is on the mark here, but to be fair, I do think some of this IRL long tail/edge case data is important for Waymo. The simulation software is super interesting to me - the real world can be so chaotic, and even if they could generate every possible real life case, there needs to be validation on whether the Waymo driver is responding in the optimal way. They certainly haven't solved this problem, you can see some of their growing pains in all of these articles - floods in Austin, more and more interactions with emergency vehicles that first responders seem to believe are getting worse, etc.

Tesla on the other hand has billions of miles of data, yet because there is a limit to camera-only techniques, that data isn't that useful is it? They have no ground truth data to evaluate their camera system on, which is why sometimes you see those Teslas driving around with lidar rigs mounted on them. Going camera-only is just asking for trouble.

> When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate

I think it's more about detecting changes to the world. You need boots on the ground, so to speak, to see that new speed limit sign or the new lane paint. The Waymo vehicle can no doubt react to changes in the world when it encounters them, relaying them back to the mothership, but it's better to know about them in advance.

Waymo might very well be missing specific kinds of data (e.g more incidents/accidents, near-collisions etc)

Also, Uber’s data might be useful for eval, not training (e.g « here is how Waymo would behave vs human drivers therefore it is safer »)

> The best example of why data collection isn’t the bottleneck is Tesla. They boast about billions of miles of data, yet they’re struggling to put out fully autonomous vehicles.

Well, TBF, the tesla data was complete garbage with earlier vehicles. They had cheap and somewhat bad cameras in the earlier vehicles that was only somewhat recently updated. And even then, I don't think Tesla is at the end of their hardware journey. I think they don't think that either, which is why they've gone to a subscription only model for self driving vehicles.

Waymo, on the other hand, has gathered less data, but more high quality data. They do the expensive mapping of a city which is a big part of why their vehicles have early on been able to do some pretty impressive feats. The drawback is getting that high quality data takes a lot of time and resources.

Sorry, having “self-driving” in the title went over the HN title char limit, so I opted for AV (autonomous vehicles) instead.

Sometimes AV is supposed to mean Anti Virus or Alternative Vote and that's really confusing because it really means Audio Visual. Anything else, no.

I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.

I was also picturing Uber drivers with a bundle of composite video cables in their hands.

AV obviously stands for Adult Video.

Augmented Virtuality?

Superficial comment

AV stands for anti vehicle.

I read it first as anti virus lol

Exactly my take as well. This would have been the right diversification move a decade ago.

Uber did invest early in self driving back in 2015, but in 2018 there was a fatality which pretty much deleted their whole program. And looks like it's taken them way too long to try picking it back up.

I was working at Lyft 8 years ago and suggested this to the head of AV program then. They didn't listen.

FWIW, a large fraction of Uber drivers aren't actually driving their own personal cars, at least around me nowadays. They're either rented or some sort of fleet vehicle (complete with TCP #)

If Waymo is going to license the software, it can be tremendously useful, in particular given the variety of uber vehicles

> surprised that Tesla never took advantage of all the cameras in all its cars to do some kind of mapping

Don’t they [1][2]?

[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/examples/1929/tesla-lea...

[2] https://electrek.co/2020/10/24/tesla-collecting-insane-amoun...

Some people would tell me that they do, but only for training their internal self-driving AI.

I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.

How is that related?

I'm not too worried about it. Yeah, it's bad that people don't understand how labor organizing works. It's bad they're not willing to stand up to shitty employers and take a little risk to make life better. But in this particular case the fear is totally illusory. It's just another silicon valley conman selling some warped "dream" that probably won't actually materialize[1]. "Autonomous Vehicles" are nowhere near production ready, and they're not going to be any time soon. Wake me up when a serious truck or car manufacturer starts rolling them out en masse, then I might start to get worried about it. Until then, it's just about the same category as flying cars--sure, we have these hexacopter contraptions which can (barely) lift a single person for 20min. Not interesting.

[1] Here's how you know:

  “Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”

People don’t understand the slow motion horror movie that this is becoming. Labor demand begets population growth for all of human history. Demand conditions set the stage for population growth. Labor surplus set the stage for population declines. Again, this has been true for all of human history.

So what are we walking into? Not 8-11 billion happy cows. A crisis. People deciding not to reproduce. The human population declining. The irony as we achieve a technical pinnacle while justifying our own extinction by choice. The great filter as it turns out is actually capitalism, a race to business efficiency against all else including the incentives of your very own species. This is the mind virus.

> I asked if he had ever heard of collective bargaining or knew about unions and he said no.

collective bargaining or unions do not prevent technological progress, but merely retard it in the hopes that their members can benefit at the cost of progress for everyone else. Look at dock workers and how they tried to prevent automation with unions.

Isn't Uber also replacing itself? If you use your human drivers to train other companies' robot taxis, aren't you gonna ruin both the human driver service and the data collection service?