I own two Tesla’s. When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy rain, the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving. Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able to drive with X number of cameras. however, it suffers from the same problems humans do: if it can’t see it can’t drive and ironically that’s when it reverts back to human control.
I definitely agree that in principle a computer can drive with cameras alone. I don't know whether it's a useful statement. Like a human can determine the genre of a movie merely by watching it. I wouldn't suggest to blockbuster in 1990 that they should collect no genre metadata for movies because the database server should automatically sort it out on its own. (Nowadays somewhat feasible with ML of course, but 20+ years later.) What sensors/data you need is a question of where computers are now or will shortly be, and it seems that for now they need the extra structure of LIDAR for best effectiveness.
>I definitely agree that in principle a computer can drive with cameras alone.
Obvious things first, cameras have way worse contrast and low light sensitivity than human eyes.
Humans have much more evolved logical thinking capacity, even the stupid ones can figure stuff out that modern AI struggles with.
Humans have other sensors, too that they use to plausibility check the picture they see. I.e. one of the best sensor fusion systems on the planet.
When in doubt humans can figure out whether it's a lens occlusion or a some other artifact in their vision by virtue of moving their head around.
There's probably other things I'm not thinking of. In any case to make full self driving work we should first start by using all available tech to make it safe. When you have safe tech you can slowly start removing individual sensors while verifying that safety remains high. As the experience and system evolves there will be optimization potential.
And until we have that low light thing and high contrast figured out, camera alone doesn't cut it.
Right, but if these things are so rare that we all only know the one viral example, I feel like that lends credence to the models basically generally not having this problem.
Researchers built the Winnograd Schema Challenge more than a decade ago to assess common sense reasoning, and LLMs beat that challenge task around GPT 4.
They're not so rare. Hallucinations have been spotted everywhere, but the "driving a car to the car wash" is an amusing one that's been recently publicised. Developers aren't going to point out every time an LLM hallucinates an entire library.
I'd add to this, any moderately involved logical or numerical problem causes hallucinations for me on all frontier models.
If you ask them in isolation they may write a script to solve it "properly", but I guess this is because they added enough of these to the training set. But this workaround doesn't scale.
As soon as I give the LLM a proper problem and a small part of it requires numeric reasoning, it almost always hallucinates something and doesn't solve it with a script.
If the logic/math is part of a larger problem the miss rate is near 100%.
LLMs have massive amounts of knowledge, encoded in verbal intelligence, but their logic intelligence is well below even average human intelligence.
If you look at how they work (tokenization and embeddings) it's clear that transformers will not solve the issue. The escape hatches only work very unreliably.
If you ask this of any current day AI it will answer exactly how you would expect. Telling you to drive, and acknowledging the comedic nature of the question.
That's because AI labs keep stamping out the widely known failures. I assume without actually retraining the main model, but with some small classifier that detects the known meme questions and injects correct answer in the context.
But try asking your favorite LLM what happens if you're holding a pen with two hands (one at each end) and let go of one end.
Not unlikely that you're talking to a lot of AI-based AI boosters. It's easier to create astroturfed comments with chatbots than fixing the inherent problems.
Nice. My test was always a blond bald guy. It always adds hair. If you ask for bald you get a dark haired bald guy, if you add blond, you can't get bald because I guess saying the hair color implies hair (on the head), while you may just want blonde eyebrows and/or blond stubble.
Well that, but Elon is also downplaying the quality of the human vision system compared to the cameras Tesla's have.
They're just not that good - nowhere near human vision performance. And a human in a car has a surprisingly good view of the road and a very fast pan tilt system to look around.
Tesla's do not actually have 360 degree full binocular vision coverage - nor the ability for a camera to lean left or right to improve an ambiguous sensor picture.
So while I fully believe that vision only self driving could work, within the constraints of automobile platforms and particularly the Tesla and it's current camera deployments, it is not remotely similar enough to human visual fidelity for that to solve a valid argument.
Tesla’s actually have zero binocular vision coverage because the cameras have different focal lengths and are too close even if they did have the same focal lengths.
They are also below minimum vision requirements for driving in many states.
> When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy rain, the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving.
I also own a Tesla, and there is no indication shown to the user that FSD's vision is degraded. They need to add this in.
For example, numerous times I have been driving my Tesla with FSD activated with ostensibly a clean and clear windshield when suddenly the car will do the "clean the windshield in front of the camera routine" without any indication that the car's camera is degraded. If people haven't seen this "clean the windshield routine", the wiper fluid is dispensed and the wiper will vigorously wipe in front of the camera only -- the rest of the windshield only gets a cursory wipe.
This indicates to me that the camera has poor visibility and I am not informed or aware of this as a driver, which is concerning. I am often curious if there is a thin occluding film on the windshield in the camera box in front of the camera, or something that has degraded FSD's vision, but they do not give you the ability to view the camera feed, nor do they notify you that the vision is degraded. I think a "thin occluding film" may be in the camera box because my normal windshield outside of the camera box started to show a thin chemical film after a couple of months, which apparently (according to a Google search) happens when a new car off-gasses, adding a thin film of chemical byproduct to the windshield. This is my first new car so I've no idea if this is normal or not.
> yes it does, and it's annoying as all hell. Dirt, sun, etc all pop an alert about degraded performance
As with all things FSD, it does sometimes and not others. I've driving my parents' Tesla with FSD engaged and it did complain when the windshield got dirty but didn't say anything when it drove into fog. (I took over manually.)
Out of curiosity, was the camera view compromised? I would probably take over too, but like the poster above, I get the warning in all kinds of conditions.
Absolutely could be a clouded windshield on the inside (where it's really hard for normal people to clean). I brought this up when I got my last Model Y that it was foggy and they said it was "fine". Took it into service over a year ago and noticed they cleaned it. Clearly it's a problem but they're not being too transparent about it. I suspect they don't want to because it's not the easiest thing to remove the cover for normal people to clean.
Recent Tesla updates will detect dirty glass inside the camera enclosure and offer to schedule (one!) free glass cleaning. You can do it yourself if you have a trim tool. (A thin plastic prybar) https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/3327/tesla-now-offers-free...
I've always hated this argument. Why should I want a system that can drive "just as any human driver can"? I want it to be much much much better than the best driver out there, like 100x or 1000x better.
That argument is dumber and dumber any time I think about it. And we haven't even gotten into the fact that human eyes and its partner in crime the brain work much different than a camera.
That’s how Musk works. He waves his hands and uses words like “orders of magnitude” and “first principles” and then you end up with 250-meter long tunnels under your city with Teslas driving back and forth in it and fanboys forget this thing called subways ever existed.
> humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able to drive with X number of cameras
Systems built from cameras that are only nearly as capable as human eyes and software that is only nearly as capable as the human brain will fall short overall. To match or surpass human performance, the individual components need to exceed human abilities where possible--and that's where LiDAR provides an advantage.
> the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving.
That's not good enough. Too many accidents at manual takeover. The new standard, which Mercedes has demonstrated and China is mandating, is that the system must be able to pull the vehicle over and stop safely when there are problems.
My Lexus does this too. I rarely get it due to weather however it’s how I know I’m past due for a car wash (dust on sensors)
In any case, it seems reasonable to me that the human should be making the decisions once conditions become adverse. It’s a simple liability issue for the car company but also I’d rather trust my own judgment if it’s only 80% certain it’s not driving me off a cliff.
One of the coolest features I saw like this was on a Jaguar XJL I had recently, that had an air particulate sensor and would automatically switch to recirc cabin air when that count was too high (i.e. dusty / smoky conditions).
yea, when it rains the world
stops and we all sit home and wait for the Sun to make an appearance. coolest part is that some places in the US get like 200+ rainy days and you get to stay home cause you have no choice, schools closed etc :)
> There isn't some kind of god riven right to transportation, it is always conditions permitting.
If the condition is a little fog and little rain and little snow/sleet I hate to break it to you but those are very permitting. In most of the continental US the number of days where driving conditions for an (below)average human and such that it is wiser not to get on the road is very small. If the "robo"taxi technology you posses cannot match that of a (below)average human you got nothing but vaporware you've been pitching as "done deal" for more than a decade.
> Well, even robotaxi's can't beat the laws of physics. There isn't some kind of god riven right to transportation, it is always conditions permitting.
> Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able...
And this is an amazingly stupid statement. Humans drive with most of their senses, not just vision. In fact our proprioception plays an important role in driving.
Even Tesla's use of cameras is poor because they're monocular and fixed in place. Most humans have binocular vision and those visual sensors have multiple degrees of freedom and the ability to adjust focus.
Even if you wanted to only use vision for navigation it's irresponsible to not use binocular configurations that get more reliable depth sensing.
>> "Elon has said several times that humans can drive with two eyes and Tesla should be able to drive with X number of cameras"
This must be one of the most stupid takes that gets repeated non stop by Tesla fans.
I just don't get it. Humans also have emotions and other biological senses that Computers don't have. You just cannot compare both.
What makes human so good at driving is that they can react relatively well to unknown new events. Teslas cannot do that, and with the current hardware never will.
Elon is deeply involved in engineering decisions in his companies, and has by all accounts deep knowledge in those areas.
And yet randos on the web keep asserting he's not an engineer. Is there any factual basis for this? Is it just that he doesn't have a degree with that word in the title?
Being an engineer is neither having a degree in engineering which he doesn't have nor managing them and it certainly isn't owning a company that employs them. It's working as an engineer.
He continually says dumb things that aren't true or reasonable and has never worked in the field he's a rich boy who bought things with daddy's aparteid money.
