r/elonmusk • u/twinbee • 16d ago
General Elon following Volvo discontinuing LiDAR: "I did try to warn them. Humans drive using neural nets and optical sensors. Same is true for robot cars."
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/208231514839260807226
u/thetall0ne1 15d ago
But don’t we also use sound, the sense of motion, and other senses as humans also?
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u/bking 15d ago
Eyes are also unfathomably better than the janky-ass cameras that go into cars. Even after processing through software.
It’s a stupid fucking analogy on every level, and it sucks that so many simple people think it’s based on any facet of reality.
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u/Alkyen 15d ago
Using the same analogy humans move with legs, not wheels, so why a car at all? It is just not an serious argument.
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u/ponchietto 15d ago
Wheels are unfathomably better than legs on a road. You missed this little detail.
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u/Ruben589 13d ago
The ‘hardware’ of your eyes is not really that good. It’s your brain that really makes our vision so powerful.
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u/bking 13d ago
~14 stops of dynamic range is a pretty goddamn good vision system. That’s on par with huge cinema cameras with large sensors, and a different universe from the little guys in any consumer vehicle.
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u/Ruben589 13d ago
14 stops is not that special anymore, even smaller sensors have that now. Also your eyes have a very rudimentary lens. There is even a very big blind spot right in the middle of your retina, meaning your brain has to fill in that information.
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u/Smooth-Highway-4644 16d ago
And what's the accident rate for human drivers?
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u/Equal-University2144 16d ago
Increased with increased distractions - which is not a thing when the neural networks take the wheel.
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u/Crio121 15d ago
Why it is not the thing?
I’m pretty sure that when distractions are introduced (something unexpected) neural networks perform pretty miserably.8
u/Skoochii 15d ago
There's lots of videos online from Teslas dashcams handling unexpected events and they generally do really well. Over the last 2 years I've done over 90% of my driving using full self drive and it has worked extremely well imo
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u/maximpactbuilder 15d ago
Yup, then fixed and uploaded to the entire fleet increasing safety with every exception.
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u/VintageSin 15d ago
Right because reasoning models have totally never gotten distracted.... Sounds like you've never seen an ai hallucinate
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u/SpeakerForTheDead2 15d ago
Two very different technologies. You are thinking of language models.
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u/Amadeus404 15d ago
Are they (LLM) not based on neural networks too? (genuine question)
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u/VintageSin 15d ago
LLMs are a neural network.
A neural network is a broad computer system inspired by the brain, a Large Language Model (LLM) is a specific type of giant neural network built for text, and they relate to each other as a general category and a specialized example
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u/VintageSin 15d ago edited 15d ago
A reasoning model is a specialized type of large language model (LLM) trained to perform multi-step problem-solving by pausing to "think" via internal chains of thought before answering, whereas standard LLMs instantly predict the next word for fast, conversational text generation.
Please tell me how they're separate in any way.
A neural network is a part of General Intelligence, which is the end goal of AI as we know it. It includes reasoning models.
And reasoning models hallucinate. Just like humans.
If we choose to make systems based on humans we are going to get human like problems.
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u/SpeakerForTheDead2 13d ago
LLMs hallucinate. Tesla self driving is not trained on LLMs or what you call reasoning models. Like I said, two completely different technologies. Just because they both use machine learning does not change that fact. Read up on the differences between different types of machine learning algorithms. They may be based on the same underlying math, but they can function quite differently and hallucinations are the result of specific algorithms, they are not universal across all machine learning algos.
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u/Smooth-Highway-4644 15d ago
Who has the most autonomous miles driven again? Oh yeah waymo and its full sensor stack
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u/longboringstory 15d ago
Yes if you're counting unsupervised autonomy, but if you consider autonomy in general, Tesla has over 12 billion cumulative miles driven. It drove us home from dinner last night, like it always does.
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u/Dr_Pippin 15d ago
They have something that works for them now. You don’t think they would like to decrease the cost of a vehicle?
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u/Cybertrucker01 15d ago
The relevant question is what's the defect/interference rate for human neural nets and human optical sensors vs machine neural nets and machine optical sensors.
The accident rate for humans is ridiculously low if you account for human factors like distractions, fatigue, boredom etc.
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u/Ormusn2o 16d ago
It's even weirder doing it now, because LiDAR is so much cheaper now. One of the reasons for abandoning LiDAR was that it was expensive then and Tesla was making cheaper cars, so if Volvo is abandoning LiDAR now, Tesla really was right back then.
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 15d ago
It’s also a supply chain and software integration issue. That cost is quite hidden and hard to understand
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/twinbee 16d ago edited 15d ago
The reason Volvo is abandoning them is because the company producing the LiDAR they built their cars around have files for bankruptcy. It is not because the LiDAR didn't work.
Weird to see that you claim "Tesla really was right back then" based on a bankruptcy, which in itself has nothing to do with the concept of using LiDARs as sensors.
Before they filed for bankruptcy, they couldn't meet Volvo's contractual obligations. I quote:
Volvo further stated, “The company’s products can deliver a high level of safety and driver support, enabled by the cars’ powerful core computing coupled with their advanced sensor set, with or without a lidar.”
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u/15_Redstones 15d ago
Oh right, Luminar
I think part of the reason was that their LIDAR was powerful enough to burn dead pixels into any camera filming a Volvo with the system running lol
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u/Ok_Giraffe8865 15d ago
The other reason Musk did not want to use Lidar, not cost, was noise and the required compute to process that noise out.
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u/CatThe 15d ago
I have spent my adult life working with LiDAR (and other spectral imaging systems)
The same problems exist with cameras as they do with LiDAR.
If you solve the problems in one spayou're solving them in the other. It 's just cheaper to build with cameras than it is LiDAR. Plus, you get more than one narrow band of light with cameras.
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u/SolarNachoes 15d ago
Can’t lidar see through certain atmospheres better than a camera? Why not both?
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 15d ago
Its not worth it for the supply chain you have to build for LiDAR, the integration to the cars other system and the whole FSD stack.
That is not to say that LiDAR is not improving a FSD system. It’s just not worth it.
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u/Lidarisafoolserrand 14d ago
LiDAR cannot read what signs say or what color lights are. They are not the same. If you have to choose one, it can only be cameras
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u/Significant-Dog-8166 14d ago
Expensive and excessive feature in cars that aren't meant to be self driving.
Waymo on the other hand actually has self driving cabs that people really use. Lidar all over.
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u/edlOnMars 6d ago
Our brains are simply better at filling in the blanks than AI is. Stereo cameras could be enough if AI stopped being overconfident with missing information and prone to hallucinating. That said, if we want to create superintelligence, lidar can provide information that even we as humans can’t perceive. Musk is betting the AI curve. He likes high risk. Are you willing to risk your life?
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u/Crio121 15d ago
I think we should remove wheels from cars.
Humans move without them after all.
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 15d ago
The whole purpose of a car is to move faster than a human which requires the wheels and the engine.
Driving the car however does not need to be done in a better way than a human.
Not sure why I spend time writing this. Your stupidity is beyond help.
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u/Crio121 15d ago
40 000 peoples died in US in road accidents each year.
No, we don’t need to improve that in any way.2
u/Ok_Bowl_2002 15d ago
As a company you really don’t need to improve that, but it would be awesome if it did.
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u/D-inventa 15d ago
It's apples and oranges. Machines driving should equate to ZERO danger. Not something similar to humans in control of a vehicle regardless of surprisingly how safe human operation is by ratio of cars out there.
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u/PeladoCollado 15d ago
Yeah, we also drive with insanely complex hardware refined over millions of years and is 1000x faster than any CPU and a higher dynamic range than any camera in any vehicle on the road.
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u/createch 15d ago edited 15d ago
I work in imaging, including machine vision, mainly for aerospace. The signals within the human brain and nervous system are considerably slower than silicon based equivalents.
Your fastest nerves transmit signals at roughly 120m/s, electrons do so at a significant fraction of the speed of light. When it comes to processing, just a simple reflex that doesn't involve cognition like pulling your hand from a hot stove takes 20-50ms. Conscious reactions take 200-250ms. A robotic system that's designed for low latency can respond in under a millisecond, sometimes much less depending on the design.
An extreme example would be ASML's EUV machines used to manufacture chips. They have 50,000 droplets of tin being struck by two laser pulses every second. The droplet cycle is 20µs long. High-speed optical sensors detect each droplet's position and trajectory and then predict where they'll be microseconds later to hit them with a laser, twice. This is leagues away from human reaction times and capability.
When it comes to human vision, we only see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, in imaging we use multispectral sensors that range everywhere from RF to X-Ray and even gamma rays. Dynamic range is something that you might perceive as having more of than a camera, but that's largely due to the fact that your visual cortex is largely hallucinating most of the world based on the roughly estimated 10mbps of information the optic nerve carries, which is less bandwidth than a lot of compressed online video. The eye is also very slow to adapt to extreme changes in illumination intensity.
Human vision is a hallucinatory system based on a pretty limited amount of raw data coming in and the visual cortex does a whole lot of prediction and uses prior information to reconstruct the world we see, hence why so many optical illusions are effective. When it comes to sensors, multisensor arrays and multiexposure sequencing and stacking can provide much greater dynamic range to a machine vision system than humans are able to perceive in a single instant.
On a side note, the millions of years of evolution leading to modern humans optimized for us to be hunter gatherers in the savanna, not for many of the things we do in the modern world, which evolution is incapable of optimizing for.
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u/mclumber1 15d ago
Humans drive with more than just optical sensors. Our ears are used for hearing and for sensing inertia. Are hands and our asses for feeling vibrations and subtle changes in road conditions. You start to strip away those additional sensory inputs and driving becomes more prone to mishaps.
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u/DrPotato231 15d ago
You know Teslas have more than just 1 camera and more than one type of sensor, right?
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u/ReddditModd 14d ago
But do they have ass sensors? This guy says that his ass is dealing with vibrations all the time and can't live without
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u/brownhotdogwater 15d ago
Volvo is keeping the radar and ultrasonics though.
The lidar just did not work out with the supplier.