It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars.
I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've worked in computer vision startups and know how powerful the tech can be, but it still can't account with even a fraction of challenging driving conditions. I don't think anything short of general purpose AI could handle it. We are some pretty big discoveries away from general AI.
There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy
E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc
This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit.
There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.
> I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all.
...
> I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable.
Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a different answer to it, sooner or later.
Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehicles, with the last mile routes covered by normal container trucks sounded like it would work in the near term.
The fact that these are big rig trucks ensures the unit volume cost of the hardware isn't going to be a big problem (a 25k computer in a 35k car vs a 120k one in a 800k truck), the servicing can be legally mandated (patch upgrades or cleaning cameras), the power supply management can also be handled if they want to go electric with a container + rig model.
There are fewer questions about a long haul highway only self-driving route, maybe even something which will change the economics of shipping stuff through the panama canal vs going over land in a hub-spoke model without a train depot style unloading/inventory station.
I think we're very far away from general-purpose self-driving that can drive in all locations, conditions, and handle all scenarios. But we don't necessarily need an all-or-nothing solution - I think we could be reasonably close to a self-driving system that can handle a whitelisted set of roads and highways, especially if those roads were augmented to accommodate that self-driving in some way.
> I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars.
Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country.
So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving.
But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out.
We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass.
It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the system still can't handle.
Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that could be cost effective. Something like that could change public transport and would be very accessible to even small cities.
It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently.
For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.
> I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars
Guess what, these people have run the numbers
> solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit
I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be applied to mass transit.
Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost of a bus and far less pollution.
In my opinion self driving cars far exceed the capabilities of current ML algorithms. I mean I guess you can spend couple of billions and implement some sort of expert system on top of that but it won’t be as simple as just training the ML algorithm.
Much better approach would be using ML as a safety sensor helper and let people drive the cars instead. For example, ML algorithm can detect if a pedestrian is on the road even on low vision conditions and might warn the driver, or check if there a car is acting weirdly on the road and warn the driver to be aware.
I think there is a catch 22 situation going on with self-driving cars. By the time we get to self driving cars at human level, we will already have cybernetic beings at human intelligence level and that will change the entire industries and the society itself, which might actually decrease the profits expected by self-driving car companies.
>I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all
They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.
It's not getting publicized very much but they did lay off people from the core AV teams (planning, controls, perception, mapping, etc.) in addition to the otherwise cited groups.
There’s at least two success criteria for SDC tech:
1) How much safer than humans does SDC need to be before we can ethically use it?
2) When will it be legalized?
The ethics is a hard question. My preference is safety standards should be way higher than the vehicular carnage we accept today. I doubt most people think that way though.
Legalization (and commercialization, especially if corporate liability is waived), could come at any moment. Given the US government accepts 3000 daily COVID19 deaths as a reasonable baseline, it seems there would be little moral qualms. If SDCs are about as good (or maybe even no more than a little worse) than human drivers approval could be granted, ethics be damned.
"doubling down on our engineering work and engineering talent,” Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta told Reuters.
Do these folks even try to hide their lies?
Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team.
Can companies be sued for these types of basically false claims or are we just stuck commenting on what lies they seem come up with. Can you imagine if your day to day life involved interacting with folks this dishonest?
I never hear the phrase "doubling down" used to mean "doubling", except maybe in the original usage in gambling. But colloquially it just means "increasing focus on". In that use there is no inherent contradiction in downsizing + attempting to increasing focus. In fact that seems to be what almost all companies who downsize are attempting to do.
Edit: In fact come to think of it, even in blackjack when you double down, it's as much about committing as it is the doubling of the bet. You have to take one and only one card and that ends your turn, so you're turning down all other options to do this one thing, and in exchange for taking that risky move you get to double your bet.
This is the kind of stuff I always advise people in long term careers to be privy of. First to go always means least cared about.
Nothing wrong with it, but always know your place in a company. Don’t ever be lulled into rhetoric such as ‘doubling down on engineering’.
‘We care about code quality’ - code quality sucks at the company, ‘we care about work life balance’ - there is none at the company, ‘we value innovation’ - can’t even suggest anything to product, stay on spec....
‘We care about future tech’ — lay off r&d at the first sight of a downturn.
One thing you also have to understand here (other than the replies I've read) is that you can in fact lay off people and yet increase the percentage investment you are making in something.
You have to cut your budget by 30% -- you can do this as a haircut everyone takes, or you can be selective, and ask one group to take less of a cut and other groups to take more. Your overall spend will be more heavily weighted towards groups that take less of a cut, obviously.
You can also leave your overall budget for one team unchanged, or even grow it, and simply change your focus by putting more emphasis (and budget) on one set of activities vs another.
In the Cruise case either scenario is possible. They can have decided that 3rd party LIDAR is good enough, and not strategic enough, that they should cut there. That could be the sum of it, while other groups like HR, Marketing, etc takes bigger cuts. Alternatively they could use the same logic to cut the LIDAR team and then take the savings generated to invest more heavily in (made up example) route planning or something.
You seem to have misunderstood what the lidar team refers to.
The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to self-driving cars using lidars today.
They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on a day to day basis.
As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving technology) have been impacted by this layoff.
What tort would you claim they’ve committed? It’s not reasonable to interpret that claim as literally doubling the amount of engineering staff. No court would consider that for even a moment. And even if you could argue that a spokesperson is lying about fuzzy concepts like the amount of focus company places on engineering, who does that wrong?
There are too many LIDAR startups chasing too little market for LIDARs. The delay in self-driving cars reaching the market means automotive LIDARs are only selling in sample quantities. GM/Cruise may not need an in-house LIDAR unit.
>Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team.
Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.
Sample of 1, but driving alongside a Cruise car in San Francisco last year was absolutely terrifying. It was coming up on bicyclists going the same direction, ahead of it, and kept swerving back and forth by four feet or so, depending on whether it "saw" them or not.
It was unable to either pass the bicylists or lurk back far enough that they could go about their own business. Meanwhile it disrupted the flow for all the rest of us regular drivers.
This is not the easiest roadway situation to "teach" an autonomous-driving system, but it's been a known issue for a long time. Not sure why Cruise couldn't get it right.
I went to a recruiting event that was put on by Cruise. It was disguised as a marketing "advisory board" where they asked us questions like "What motivates you as an engineer when looking for a new job? Would changing the world help?"
"Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?"
"Which of these statements most resonate with you?"
They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales pitch. Then I finally caved and had an interview where the hardest question was how to flatten an array. I passed on that place...
Funny, as they were just a few weeks ago (even during the lockdown) certain recruiters were saying they were aggressively hiring -- and are still listed as hiring for example here: https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/
Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate.
Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.
Just a note, but this is a perfect time for companies to lay off low performers without getting a lot of flak. This is usually the case when you see companies lay off people while continuing to hire as well.
When I proposed this to nVidia engineers, fairly high up, they argued that if humans could do it with two eyes, they could do it in 3 years. It's now 5 years later.
Cruise cars are constantly driving and testing in my neighborhood in SF. I can assure you, I will never step foot in one of those death machines. I see them make mistakes all the time.
There is no going back. Viruses are not going to disappear, we just lived in our urbanization bubble for a very long time. On the nature scale of things it's extremely short.
Cheap flights and ludicrous interconnectedness are not that necessary and are barely more than disease vectors.
Local food, local communities, and work in your basement on anything via the internet is a development for quite some time now.
Goods can stay transported as before, but shuffling tourists around the globe via government financing said industries out from bancruptcy every ten years is dumb, corona or no corona.
[+] [-] zelly|5 years ago|reply
Now we're worried about all the AI jobs disappearing.
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've worked in computer vision startups and know how powerful the tech can be, but it still can't account with even a fraction of challenging driving conditions. I don't think anything short of general purpose AI could handle it. We are some pretty big discoveries away from general AI.
I also don't think they solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc
This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit.
There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.
[+] [-] gopalv|5 years ago|reply
Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a different answer to it, sooner or later.
Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehicles, with the last mile routes covered by normal container trucks sounded like it would work in the near term.
The fact that these are big rig trucks ensures the unit volume cost of the hardware isn't going to be a big problem (a 25k computer in a 35k car vs a 120k one in a 800k truck), the servicing can be legally mandated (patch upgrades or cleaning cameras), the power supply management can also be handled if they want to go electric with a container + rig model.
There are fewer questions about a long haul highway only self-driving route, maybe even something which will change the economics of shipping stuff through the panama canal vs going over land in a hub-spoke model without a train depot style unloading/inventory station.
[+] [-] kylec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MiroF|5 years ago|reply
How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality.
I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country.
So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving.
[+] [-] kgin|5 years ago|reply
But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out.
We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass.
It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the system still can't handle.
[+] [-] fiftyfifty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|5 years ago|reply
For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.
[+] [-] kevindong|5 years ago|reply
Just level 3 or 4 autonomous vehicles would probably be good enough to be worth buying.
[+] [-] sida|5 years ago|reply
Guess what, these people have run the numbers
> solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit
I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be applied to mass transit.
Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost of a bus and far less pollution.
[+] [-] DethNinja|5 years ago|reply
Much better approach would be using ML as a safety sensor helper and let people drive the cars instead. For example, ML algorithm can detect if a pedestrian is on the road even on low vision conditions and might warn the driver, or check if there a car is acting weirdly on the road and warn the driver to be aware.
I think there is a catch 22 situation going on with self-driving cars. By the time we get to self driving cars at human level, we will already have cybernetic beings at human intelligence level and that will change the entire industries and the society itself, which might actually decrease the profits expected by self-driving car companies.
[+] [-] economicslol|5 years ago|reply
They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.
[+] [-] CaffeineSqurr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdavis703|5 years ago|reply
1) How much safer than humans does SDC need to be before we can ethically use it?
2) When will it be legalized?
The ethics is a hard question. My preference is safety standards should be way higher than the vehicular carnage we accept today. I doubt most people think that way though.
Legalization (and commercialization, especially if corporate liability is waived), could come at any moment. Given the US government accepts 3000 daily COVID19 deaths as a reasonable baseline, it seems there would be little moral qualms. If SDCs are about as good (or maybe even no more than a little worse) than human drivers approval could be granted, ethics be damned.
[+] [-] staticassertion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thoraway1010|5 years ago|reply
Do these folks even try to hide their lies?
Doubling down = 2x the engineering staff. This is as they lay off in their lidar team.
Can companies be sued for these types of basically false claims or are we just stuck commenting on what lies they seem come up with. Can you imagine if your day to day life involved interacting with folks this dishonest?
[+] [-] cactus2093|5 years ago|reply
Edit: In fact come to think of it, even in blackjack when you double down, it's as much about committing as it is the doubling of the bet. You have to take one and only one card and that ends your turn, so you're turning down all other options to do this one thing, and in exchange for taking that risky move you get to double your bet.
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
Nothing wrong with it, but always know your place in a company. Don’t ever be lulled into rhetoric such as ‘doubling down on engineering’.
‘We care about code quality’ - code quality sucks at the company, ‘we care about work life balance’ - there is none at the company, ‘we value innovation’ - can’t even suggest anything to product, stay on spec....
‘We care about future tech’ — lay off r&d at the first sight of a downturn.
Just shut the fuck up already.
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
"I think it's time to double down on email marketing" -> my teammates understand that means I'm going to switch where I put most of my effort.
I can just imagine you saying "Yet you're not allocating 8 hours a day instead of 4 on this. I'm going to sue you"
God, that would be exhausting.
[+] [-] sulam|5 years ago|reply
You have to cut your budget by 30% -- you can do this as a haircut everyone takes, or you can be selective, and ask one group to take less of a cut and other groups to take more. Your overall spend will be more heavily weighted towards groups that take less of a cut, obviously.
You can also leave your overall budget for one team unchanged, or even grow it, and simply change your focus by putting more emphasis (and budget) on one set of activities vs another.
In the Cruise case either scenario is possible. They can have decided that 3rd party LIDAR is good enough, and not strategic enough, that they should cut there. That could be the sum of it, while other groups like HR, Marketing, etc takes bigger cuts. Alternatively they could use the same logic to cut the LIDAR team and then take the savings generated to invest more heavily in (made up example) route planning or something.
[+] [-] rifflebutter|5 years ago|reply
The Lidar team laid off is not part of Cruise's essential engineering team. It belongs to a small, research/demo-focused company that Cruise bought a long time ago which claimed they would make solid-state Lidars that costs 99% less than currently available lidars, which would cut most of the cost to self-driving cars using lidars today.
They function as a separate entity from Cruise and have very little to do with Cruise's core self-driving technology team on a day to day basis.
As the article has made clear, within Cruise's engineering team, only the non-essential teams (i.e. not core self-driving technology) have been impacted by this layoff.
[+] [-] baddox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deminature|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
There are too many LIDAR startups chasing too little market for LIDARs. The delay in self-driving cars reaching the market means automotive LIDARs are only selling in sample quantities. GM/Cruise may not need an in-house LIDAR unit.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] monadic2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tehjoker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tschwimmer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] primrose|5 years ago|reply
Looks like GM is catching up to where the industry was a year ago, from A cofounder of Waymo.
https://youtu.be/0w1G2GyPTUM
[+] [-] aphextron|5 years ago|reply
Self driving will be solved with computer vision. Lidar is an unnecessary technology even for full level 5 autonomy. Most self driving companies have come to this conclusion by now.
[+] [-] GCA10|5 years ago|reply
It was unable to either pass the bicylists or lurk back far enough that they could go about their own business. Meanwhile it disrupted the flow for all the rest of us regular drivers.
This is not the easiest roadway situation to "teach" an autonomous-driving system, but it's been a known issue for a long time. Not sure why Cruise couldn't get it right.
[+] [-] jiofih|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|5 years ago|reply
"Would you like to be rewarded handsomely?"
"Which of these statements most resonate with you?"
They paid me $500 for about an hour to sit through their sales pitch. Then I finally caved and had an interview where the hardest question was how to flatten an array. I passed on that place...
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
Seems like suddenly they got worried about how long they can maintain the burn rate.
Doesn't help that driving and commuting fell off the map.
[+] [-] FreedomToCreate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greendave|5 years ago|reply
Their hiring rate has been remarkable. Less than 3 years ago (6/2017) they had 200 employees. Just over a year ago (3/2019), they had ~1000.
[+] [-] ipsum2|5 years ago|reply
"Thursday, the layoff includes staff at an engineering team in Padasedna, California"
The article says "Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee and David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio". Two editors missed the typo.
[+] [-] sdan|5 years ago|reply
Obviously this is a bad thing, but not entirely surprising they had to hold the brakes during this time.
[+] [-] Fricken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanguy|5 years ago|reply
So much internal overlap and fragmentation that I would not be shocked they are hiring and firing at the same time - perhaps even the same people
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] GPUboy|5 years ago|reply
When I proposed this to nVidia engineers, fairly high up, they argued that if humans could do it with two eyes, they could do it in 3 years. It's now 5 years later.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anxman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrenko|5 years ago|reply
Cheap flights and ludicrous interconnectedness are not that necessary and are barely more than disease vectors.
Local food, local communities, and work in your basement on anything via the internet is a development for quite some time now.
Goods can stay transported as before, but shuffling tourists around the globe via government financing said industries out from bancruptcy every ten years is dumb, corona or no corona.
[+] [-] GEBBL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]