Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense. I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the same way as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is a robot of sorts.
Google/Alphabet are so vertically integrated for AI when you think about it. Compare what they're doing - their own power generation , their own silicon, their own data centers, search Gmail YouTube Gemini workspace wallet, billions and billions of Android and Chromebook users, their ads everywhere, their browser everywhere, waymo, probably buy back Boston dynamics soon enough (they're recently partnered together), fusion research, drugs discovery.... and then look at ChatGPT's chatbot or grok's porn. Pales in comparison.
xnx 46 minutes ago [-]
> Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense
Tesla built something like this for FSD training, they presented many years ago. I never understood why they did productize it. It would have made a brilliant Maps alternative, which country automatically update from Tesla cars on the road. Could live update with speed cameras and road conditions. Like many things they've fallen behind
jellojello 48 minutes ago [-]
Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.
ASalazarMX 28 minutes ago [-]
At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
smallmancontrov 5 minutes ago [-]
His stated reason was that he wanted the team focused on the driving problem, not sensor fusion "now you have two problems" problems. People assumed cost was the real reason, but it seems unfair to blame him for what people assumed. Don't get me wrong, I don't like him either, but that's not due to his autonomous driving leadership decisions, it's because of shitting up twitter, shitting up US elections with handouts, shitting up the US government with DOGE, seeking Epstein's "wildest party," DARVO every day, and so much more.
iamtheworstdev 10 minutes ago [-]
he didn't refuse it. MobileEye or whoever cut Tesla off because they were using the lidar sensors in a way he didn't approve. From there he got mad and said "no more lidar!"
verelo 31 minutes ago [-]
Yeah its absurd. As a Tesla driver, I have to say the autopilot model really does feel like what someone who's never driven a car before thinks it's like.
Using vision only is so ignorant of what driving is all about: sound, vibration, vision, heat, cold...these are all clues on road condition. If the car isn't feeling all these things as part of the model, you're handicapping it. In a brilliant way Lidar is the missing piece of information a car needs without relying on multiple sensors, it's probably superior to what a human can do, where as vision only is clearly inferior.
smallmancontrov 20 minutes ago [-]
The inputs to FSD are:
7 cameras x 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s
48kHz audio
Nav maps and route for next few miles
100Hz kinematics (speed, IMU, odometry, etc)
Maybe vision-only can work with much better cameras, with a wider spectrum (so they can see thru fog, for example), and self-cleaning/zero upkeep (so you don't have to pull over to wipe a speck of mud from them). Nevertheless, LIDAR still seems like the best choice overall.
0xfaded 21 minutes ago [-]
I have HW3, but FSD reliably disengages at this time of year with sunrise and sunset during commute hours.
smeeth 1 hours ago [-]
I always understood this to be why Tesla started working on humanoid robots
ACCount37 14 minutes ago [-]
Pretty much. They banked on "if we can solve FSD, we can partially solve humanoid robot autonomy, because both are robots operating in poorly structured real world environments".
themafia 21 minutes ago [-]
It's a 3500lb robot that can kill you.
Boston Robotics is working on a smaller robot that can kill you.
Anduril is working on even smaller robots that can kill you.
The future sucks.
zzzeek 1 minutes ago [-]
and they're all controlled by (poorly compensated) humans anyway [1] [2]
Erm, a dishwasher, washing machine, automated vacuum can be considered robots. Im confused as to this obsession of the term - there are many robots that already exist. Robotics have been involved in the production of cars for decades.
......
ASalazarMX 19 minutes ago [-]
I think the (gray) line is the degree of autonomy. My washing machine makes very small, predictable decisions, while a Waymo has to manage uncertainty most of the time.
sdf2erf 17 minutes ago [-]
Its irrelevant. A robot is a robot.
Dictionary def: "a machine controlled by a computer that is used to perform jobs automatically."
mattlondon 8 minutes ago [-]
No one is denying that robots existed already (but I would hardly call a dishwasher a robot FWIW)
But in my mind a waymo was always a "car with sensors", but more recently (especially having recently used them a bunch in California recently) I've come to think of them truly as robots.
ASalazarMX 9 minutes ago [-]
TIL fuel injectors are robots. Probably my ceiling lights too.
Maybe we need to nitpick about what a job is exactly? Or we could agree to call Waymos (semi)autonomous robots?
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
> The Waymo World Model can convert those kinds of videos, or any taken with a regular camera, into a multimodal simulation—showing how the Waymo Driver would see that exact scene.
Subtle brag that Waymo could drive in camera-only mode if they chose to. They've stated as much previously, but that doesn't seem widely known.
bonsai_spool 2 hours ago [-]
I think I'm misunderstanding - they're converting video into their representation which was bootstrapped with LIDAR, video and other sensors. I feel you're alluding to Tesla, but Tesla could never have this outcome since they never had a LIDAR phase.
(edit - I'm referring to deployed Tesla vehicles, I don't know what their research fleet comprises, but other commenters explain that this fleet does collect LIDAR)
I think what we are seeing is that they both converged on the correct approach, one of them decided to talk about it, and it triggered disclosure all around since nobody wants to be seen as lagging.
tfehring 1 hours ago [-]
I watched that video around both timestamps and didn't see or hear any mention of LIDAR, only of video.
smallmancontrov 54 minutes ago [-]
Exactly: they convert video into a world model representation suitable for 3D exploration and simulation without using LIDAR (except perhaps for scale calibration).
tfehring 46 minutes ago [-]
My mistake - I misinterpreted your comment, but after re-reading more carefully, it's clear that the video confirms exactly what you said.
IhateAI_3 28 minutes ago [-]
tesla is not impressive, I would never put my child in one
yakz 2 hours ago [-]
Tesla does collect LIDAR data (people have seen them doing it, it's just not on all of the cars) and they do generate depth maps from sensor data, but from the examples I've seen it is much lower resolution than these Waymo examples.
justapassenger 2 hours ago [-]
Tesla does it to map the areas to come up with high def maps for areas where their cars try to operate.
vardump 2 hours ago [-]
Tesla uses lidar to train their models to generate depth data out of camera input. I don’t think they have any high definition maps.
ActorNightly 2 hours ago [-]
The purpose of lidar is to prove error correction when you need it most in terms of camera accuracy loss.
Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with both eyes.
dbt00 2 hours ago [-]
(Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance, which is why so many people get simulator sickness from stereoscopic 3d VR)
mikepurvis 1 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that contextual clues are a big part of it too. We see a the pitcher wind up and throw a baseball as us more than we stereoscopically track its progress from the mound to the plate.
More subtly, a lot of depth information comes from how big we expect things to be, since everyday life is full of things we intuitively know the sizes of, frames of reference in the form of people, vehicles, furniture, etc
. This is why the forced perspective of theme park castles is so effective— our brains want to see those upper windows as full sized, so we see the thing as 2-3x bigger than it actually is. And in the other direction, a lot of buildings in Las Vegas are further away than they look because hotels like the Bellagio have large black boxes on them that group a 2x2 block of the actual room windows.
wolrah 44 minutes ago [-]
> Always worth noting, human depth perception is not just based on stereoscopic vision, but also with focal distance
Also subtle head and eye movements, which is something a lot of people like to ignore when discussing camera-based autonomy. Your eyes are always moving around which changes the perspective and gives a much better view of depth as we observe parallax effects. If you need a better view in a given direction you can turn or move your head. Fixed cameras mounted to a car's windshield can't do either of those things, so you need many more of them at higher resolutions to even come close to the amount of data the human eye can gather.
kevindamm 60 minutes ago [-]
Actually the reason people experience vection in VR is not focal depth but the dissonance between what their eyes are telling them and what their inner ear and tactile senses are telling them.
It's possible they get headaches from the focal length issues but that's different.
menaerus 2 hours ago [-]
How expensive is their lidar system?
hangonhn 2 hours ago [-]
Hesai has driven the cost into the $200 to 400 range now. That said I don't know what they cost for the ones needed for driving. Either way we've gone from thousands or tens of thousands into the hundreds dollar range now.
bragr 1 hours ago [-]
Looking at prices, I think you are wrong and automotive Lidar is still in the 4 to 5 figure range. HESAI might ship Lidar units that cheap, but automotive grade still seems quite expensive: https://www.cratustech.com/shop/lidar/
jellojello 43 minutes ago [-]
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jmux 1 hours ago [-]
Waymo does their LiDAR in-house, so unfortunately we don’t know the specs or the cost
That was 2 generations of hardware ago (4th gen Chrysler Pacificas). They are about to introduce 6th gen hardware. It's a safe bet that it's much cheaper now, given how mass produced LiDARs cost ~$200.
nerdsniper 59 minutes ago [-]
Otto and Uber and the CEO of https://pronto.ai do though (tongue-in-cheek)
> Then, in December 2016, Waymo received evidence suggesting that Otto and Uber were actually using Waymo’s trade secrets and patented LiDAR designs. On December 13, Waymo received an email from one of its LiDAR-component vendors. The email, which a Waymo employee was copied on, was titled OTTO FILES and its recipients included an email alias indicating that the thread was a discussion among members of the vendor’s “Uber” team. Attached to the email was a machine drawing of what purported to be an Otto circuit board (the “Replicated Board”) that bore a striking resemblance to – and shared several unique characteristics with – Waymo’s highly confidential current-generation LiDAR circuit board, the design of which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his resignation.
The presiding judge, Alsup, said, "this is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen. This was not small. This was massive in scale."
(Pronto connection: Levandowski got pardoned by Trump and is CEO of Pronto autonomous vehicles.)
Tesla told us their strategy was vertical integration and scale to drive down all input costs in manufacturing these vehicles...
...oh, except lidar, that's going to be expensive forever, for some reason?
pants2 2 hours ago [-]
Another way humans perceive depth is by moving our heads and perceiving parallax.
SecretDreams 2 hours ago [-]
> Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with both eyes.
Humans do this with vibes and instincts, not just depth perception. When I can't see the lines on the road because there's too much slow, I can still interpret where they would be based on my familiarity with the roads and my implicit knowledge of how roads work, e.g. We do similar things for heavy rain or fog, although, sometimes those situations truly necessitate pulling over or slowing down and turning on your 4s - lidar might genuinely given an advantage there.
pookeh 2 hours ago [-]
That’s the purpose of the neural networks
array_key_first 1 hours ago [-]
Yes and no - vibes and instincts isn't just thought, it's real senses. Humans have a lot of senses; dozens of them. Including balance, pain, sense of passage of time, and body orientation. Not all of these senses are represented in autonomous vehicles, and it's not really clear how the brain mashes together all these senses to make decisions.
2 hours ago [-]
mycall 2 hours ago [-]
That is still important for safety reasons in case someone uses a LiDAR jamming system to try to force you into an accident.
etrautmann 2 hours ago [-]
It’s way easier to “jam” a camera with bright light than a lidar, which uses both narrow band optical filters and pulsed signals with filters to detect that temporal sequence. If I were an adversary, going after cameras is way way easier.
sroussey 55 minutes ago [-]
Oh yeah, point a q-beam at a Tesla at night, lol. Blindness!
Jyaif 2 hours ago [-]
If somebody wants to hurt you while you are traveling in a car, there are simpler ways.
dooglius 57 minutes ago [-]
They may be trying to suggest that, that claim does not follow from the quoted statement.
shihab 2 hours ago [-]
I think there are two steps here: converting video to sensor data input, and using that sensor data to drive. Only the second step will be handled by cars on road, first one is purely for training.
uejfiweun 2 hours ago [-]
I've always wondered... if Lidar + Cameras is always making the right decision, you should theoretically be able to take the output of the Lidar + Cameras model and use it as training data for a Camera only model.
olex 2 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what Tesla is doing with their validation vehicles, the ones with Lidar towers on top. They establish the "ground truth" from Lidar and use that to train and/or test the vision model. Presumably more "test", since they've most often been seen in Robotaxi service expansion areas shortly before fleet deployment.
bob_theslob646 2 hours ago [-]
Is that exactly true though? Can you give a reference for that?
olex 2 hours ago [-]
I don't have a specific source, no. I think it was mentioned in one of their presentation a few years back, that they use various techniques for "ground truth" for vision training, among those was time series (depth change over time should be continuous etc) and iirc also "external" sources for depth data, like LiDAR. And their validation cars equipped with LiDAR towers are definitely being seen everywhere they are rolling out their Robotaxi services.
2 hours ago [-]
dbcurtis 54 minutes ago [-]
No, I don't think that will be successful. Consider a day where the temperature and humidity is just right to make tail pipe exhaust form dense fog clouds. That will be opaque or nearly so to a camera, transparent to a radar, and I would assume something in between to a lidar. Multi-modal sensor fusion is always going to be more reliable at classifying some kinds of challenging scene segments. It doesn't take long to imagine many other scenarios where fusing the returns of multiple sensors is going to greatly increase classification accuracy.
__alexs 2 hours ago [-]
> you should theoretically be able to take the output of the Lidar + Cameras model and use it as training data for a Camera only model.
Why should you be able to do that exactly? Human vision is frequently tricked by it's lack of depth data.
scarmig 2 hours ago [-]
"Exactly" is impossible: there are multiple Lidar samples that would map to the same camera sample. But what training would do is build a model that could infer the most likely Lidar representation from a camera representation. There would still be cases where the most likely Lidar for a camera input isn't a useful/good representation of reality, e.g. a scene with very high dynamic range.
etrautmann 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, but those models would never have online access to information only provided in lidar data…
tfehring 51 minutes ago [-]
No, but if you run a shadow or offline camera-only model in parallel with a camera + LIDAR model, you can (1) measure how much worse the camera-only model is so you can decide when (if ever) it's safe enough to stop installing LIDAR, and (2) look at the specific inputs for which the models diverge and focus on improving the camera-only model in those situations.
jrm4 9 minutes ago [-]
1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure.
2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.
smotched 4 minutes ago [-]
America is not europe, how would public transport work for the last 1/2miles
ra7 2 hours ago [-]
The novel aspect here seems to be 3D LiDAR output from 2D video using post-training. As far as I'm aware, no other video world models can do this.
IMO, access to DeepMind and Google infra is a hugely understated advantage Waymo has that no other competitor can replicate.
codexb 24 minutes ago [-]
3d from moving 2d images has been a thing for decades.
ra7 15 minutes ago [-]
This is 3D LiDAR output (multimodal) from 2D images.
ActorNightly 9 minutes ago [-]
This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way.
Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from there.
Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you into the input to your driving model being vision, which means that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data, which is wasteful.
mellosouls 2 hours ago [-]
Deepmind's Project Genie under the hood (pun intended). Deepmind & Waymo both Alphabet(Google) subsidiaries obv.
Regardless of the corporate structure DeepMind is a lot more than just another Alphabet subsidiary at this point considering Demis Hassabis is leading all of Google AI.
We started with physics-based simulators for training policies. Then put them in the real world using modular perception/prediction/planning systems. Once enough data was collected, we went back to making simulators. This time, they're physics "informed" deep learning models.
NullHypothesist 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they can simulate the Beatles crossing the street at Abbey Road in the late '60s
seanhunter 2 hours ago [-]
As a Londoner who used to have to ride up Abbey Road at least once per week there are people on that crossing pretty much all day every day reproducing that picture. So now Waymo are in Beta in London[1] they have only to drive up there and they'll get plenty of footage they could use for taht.
[1] I've seen a couple of them but they're not available to hire yet and are still very rare.
permenant 19 minutes ago [-]
Will Google finally fund Christopher Wren's post great fire "wide streets" rebuild of the City?
LowLevelKernel 13 minutes ago [-]
Instructions to load it on WAYMAX simulator?
999900000999 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't look like they're going to open sources or anything, but I could imagine this would be great for city planning.
Or the most realistic game of SimCity you could imagine.
mgaunard 2 hours ago [-]
Still needs to be trained on the final boss: dense cities with narrow streets.
reluctant_dev 2 hours ago [-]
San Francisco isn't uniformly dense and narrow, but it does have both, and it's run remarkably well so far.
elliotec 58 minutes ago [-]
Another comment mentioned the Philippines as the manifest frontier. SF is not on the same plane of reality in terms of density or narrow streets as PH, I would argue in comparison it does not have both.
smallmancontrov 30 minutes ago [-]
This is the craziest I've seen, but it was 10 months ago which is ~10 years in AI years
On that specific count, not really. There's a skate park north end of the Mission, and Stevenson St is a two way road that borders it, but it's narrow enough that you need to drive up on the curb to get two vehicles side by side on the street. Waymo's can't handle that on a regular basis. Being San Francisco and not London, you can just skip that road, but if you find yourself in a Waymo on that street and are unlucky to have other traffic on it, the Waymo will just have to back up the entire street. Hope there's no one behind you as well as in front of you!
Anyway, we'll see how the London rollout goes, but I get the impression London's got a lot more of those kinds of roads.
rootusrootus 31 minutes ago [-]
> Stevenson St is a two way road
That is extremely narrow, I wonder why the city has not designated it as a one-way street? They've done that for other similarly narrow sections of the same street farther north.
This is an alley in Coimbra, Portugal. A couple years ago I stayed at a hotel in this very street and took a cab from the train station. The driver could have stopped in the praça below and told me to walk 15m up. Instead the guy went all the way up then curved through 5-10 alleys like that to drop me off right right in front of my place. At a significant speed as well. It was one of the craziest car rides I've ever experienced.
stackedinserter 6 minutes ago [-]
Do we really need FSD cars (any cars, actually) in medieval city centers?
breckinloggins 2 hours ago [-]
I live in such an area. The route to my house involves steep topography via small windy streets that are very narrow and effectively one-way due to parked cars.
Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.
As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get palpably angry at me for driving the route.
chpatrick 25 minutes ago [-]
They're being trialled in London right now.
dandaka 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, something like Ho Chi Minh or Mumbai in a peak hour! With lots of bike riders, pedestrians, and livestock at the same roundabout.
Does it, though? Maybe Dhaka will never get Waymo. The same way you can’t get advanced gene therapy there.
01100011 20 minutes ago [-]
Nvidia has had this for years. What am I missing?
ge96 21 minutes ago [-]
What is the 5/3 tiles? Cameras?
AndrewKemendo 38 minutes ago [-]
For whatever it’s worth World models is going to be the dominant computing structure of the future
I started working heavily on realizing them in 2016 and it is unquestionably (finally) the future of AI
PeterStuer 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine driving in a Waymo 'out of a raging fire'.
Talk about edge cases.
But, what would you do? Trust the Waymo, or get out (or never get in) at the first sign of trouble?
breckinloggins 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay in it.
This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these vehicles.
bragr 1 hours ago [-]
>it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately
It was on the home screen when I've taken it, and when I tested it, it seemed to pull to the first safe place. I don't trust the general pubic with a stop button.
tensor 2 hours ago [-]
Can you not just unlock and open the door? Wouldn't that cause it to immediately stop? Or can you not unlock the door manually? I'd be surprised if there was not an emergency door release.
kylehotchkiss 53 minutes ago [-]
I can! If the Waymo got you into one on the way home because Google didn’t integrate with watch duty yet, that’s plausible
tgrowazay 49 minutes ago [-]
This page crashes my browser.
Vivaldi 7.8.3931.63 on iOS 26.2.1 iPhone 16 pro
mempko 2 hours ago [-]
One interesting thing from this paper is how big of a LiDaR shadow there is around the waymo car which suggests they rely on cameras for anything close (maybe they have radar too?). Seems LiDaR is only useful for distant objects.
Can you explain? I lived in PH, and my guess is that you mean navigating and modeling the unending and constantly changing chaos of the street systems (and lack thereof) is going to be a monumental task which I completely agree with. It would be an impressive feat if possible.
Seems interesting, but why is it broken. Waymo repeatedly directed multiple automated vehicles into the private alley off of 5th near Brannan in SF even after being told none of them have any business there ever, period. If they can sense the weather and stuff then maybe they could put out a virtual sign or fence that notes what appears to be a road is neither a through way nor open to the public? I'm really bullish on automated driving long term, but now that vehicles are present for real we need to start to think about potentially getting serious about finding some way to get them to comply with the same laws that limit what people can do.
tanseydavid 45 minutes ago [-]
>> get them to comply with the same laws that limit what people can do
I think you meant, "Attempt" to limit what people can do.
Driving in SF (for example) provides many opportunities to see "free will" exerted in the most extreme ways -- laws be damned.
andrewmcwatters 2 hours ago [-]
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turtlesdown11 2 hours ago [-]
How many Filipinos, who do not have US drivers licenses, does it take to drive this new model?
devmor 2 hours ago [-]
Wow, interesting timing for this PR blast considering the admission in the Senate Commerce Committee hearing. Not transparent at all!
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
What was the admission? That they use cheap labor to provide the waymo clarity when it is confused? That has been known for a long time.
My understanding is that support is basically playing an RTS (point and click), not a 1P driving game. Which makes sense, if they were directly controlling the vehicles they'd put support in central America for better latency, like the food delivery bot drivers
jonas21 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Waymo described how this works a couple of years ago:
Right, I totally believe Waymo, just like I totally believed Amazon's checkout-less stores.
TulliusCicero 2 hours ago [-]
This isn't news, they've always acknowledged that they have remote navigators that tell the cars what to do when they get stuck or confused. It's just that they don't directly drive the car.
Kapura 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting that this should come out right as lawmakers are beginning to understand that Waymos have overseas operators making major decisions.
The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult situation".
Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet fixed have a human intervene.
Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.
ChadNauseam 1 hours ago [-]
Whenever something like this comes out, it's a good moment to find people with no critical thinking skills who can safely be ignored. Driving a waymo like an RC car from the philippines? you can barely talk over zoom with someone in the philippines without bitrate and lag issues.
hijnksforall 58 minutes ago [-]
Hacker News has had some of the dumbest Tesla takes of all time. People should be embarrassed about some of the claims that were made here.
And apparently some people still haven't caught on.
I haven't read anything about this but I would also suppose long distance human intervention cannot be done for truly critical situations where you need a very quick reaction, whereas it would be more appropriate in situations where the car has stopped and is stuck not knowing what to do. Probably just stating the obvious here but indeed this seems like something very different from an RC car kind of situation.
sroussey 47 minutes ago [-]
It’s not for that. It’s for things like the car drove into a protest area and people are surrounding the car. Or police blocked off an intersection and the car is stuck temporarily with people doing otherwise illegal u-turns or driving the wrong way on a one way road to get out of it.
mossTechnician 60 minutes ago [-]
What makes the statement completely false? GP says remote operators make "major decisions", which sounds almost identical to the corporate spokesperson asserting they make choices in "difficult situations".
(1% of the time sounds like a lot of time when human lives are on the line, but I'm not clear who would be held responsible when death inevitably occurs.)
thethimble 2 hours ago [-]
Why is this relevant at all?
Having humans in the loop at some level is necessary for handling rare edge cases safely.
mrcwinn 2 hours ago [-]
If that’s true the system isn’t finished. That’s what reasoning is for.
sroussey 46 minutes ago [-]
Who ever said they were finished? You think the laid off the team since everything is “done”?
OGEnthusiast 2 hours ago [-]
What's going to happen to all the millions of drivers who will lose their job overnight? In a country with 100 million guns, are we really sure we've thought this through?
0x457 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, let's stop all progress and roll-back all automation to keep hypothetical angry people with guns happy.
Phenomenit 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like a good description on current events.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
Autonomous private cars is not the technological progress you think it is. We’ve had autonomous trains for decades, and while it provides us with a more efficient and cost effective public transit system, it didn’t open the doors for the next revolutionary technology.
Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will introduce a whole host of new problems which are already solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
drewmate 11 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.
It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
sekai 2 hours ago [-]
> We’ve had autonomous trains for decades
Trains need tracks, cars - already have the infrastructure to drive on.
> Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will introduce a whole host of new problems which are already solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
Self driving cars will literally become a part of public transit
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
> Self driving cars will literally become a part of public transit
I’ve been hearing people say that for almost 15 years now. I believe it when I see it.
tanseydavid 42 minutes ago [-]
>> I believe it when I see it.
I'm willing to wager that you might not actually believe it at that point either.
xnx 40 minutes ago [-]
> Self driving cars is a dead end technology
I would be happy to bet on some strict definition of your claim.
pnut 2 hours ago [-]
Nope. Humans are statistically fallible and their attention is too valuable to be obliged to a mundane task like executing navigation commands. Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure isn't happening, look around. Also personal agency limits public transportation as a solution.
askl 13 minutes ago [-]
> Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure isn't happening, look around.
The US already did it once (just in the wrong direction) by redesigning all cities to be unfriendly to humans and only navigable by cars. It should be technically possible to revert that mistake.
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
Unlike autonomous driving, public transit is a proven solution employed in thousands of cities around the world, on various scales, economies, etc.
> Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure isn't happening, look around.
We have been redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure since we had cities. Where I live (Seattle) they are opening a new light rail bridge crossing just next month (first rail over a floting bridge; which is technologically very interesting), and two new rail lines are being planned. In the 1960s the Bay area completely revolutionized their transit sytem when they opened BART.
I think you are simply wrong here.
tanseydavid 38 minutes ago [-]
>> In the 1960s the Bay area completely revolutionized their transit sytem when they opened BART.
66 years later we see California struggling terribly with implementation of a high-speed rail system -- where the placement/location of the infrastructure largely is targeted for areas far less dense than the Bay Area.
I don't think there is any single reason why this is so much more difficult now then it was in 1960 -- but clearly things have changed quite a lot in that time.
paxys 2 hours ago [-]
Waymo has been operating since 2004 (22 years ago), and replacing drivers on the road will take many more decades. Nothing is happening "overnight".
2 hours ago [-]
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
If Waymo's history is any guide, it's not going to happen overnight. Even in San Francisco, their market share is only 20-30%.
sroussey 44 minutes ago [-]
Reminds me of the history or radio and the absolute uproar that someone played a record on the radio rather than live performances!!
36 minutes ago [-]
sekai 2 hours ago [-]
> What's going to happen to all the millions of drivers who will lose their job overnight? In a country with 100 million guns, are we really sure we've thought this through?
Same was said about electricity, or the internet.
password54321 32 minutes ago [-]
People keep referencing history but this really is unprecedented. We are approaching singularity and many people will become obsolete in all areas. There are no new hypothetical jobs waiting on the horizon.
sigspec 2 hours ago [-]
UBI or war, or both
lanthissa 2 hours ago [-]
same thing that happened during the industrial revolution, you pay enough of them to 'protect the law' vs the rest.
VirusNewbie 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think Uber goes out of business. There is probably a sweet spot for Waymo's steady state cars, and you STILL might want 'surge' capabilities for part time workers who can repurpose their cars to make a little extra money here and there.
As to the revolt, America doesn't do that any more. Years of education have removed both the vim and vigor of our souls. People will complain. They will do a TikTok dance as protest. Some will go into the streets. No meaningful uprising will occur.
The poor and the affected will be told to go to the trades. That's the new learn to program. Our tech overlords will have their media tell us that everything is ok (packaging it appropriately for the specific side of the aisle).
Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium. Not terrible, but not a world dominating, hand cutting entity it once was.
markvdb 2 hours ago [-]
> Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium.
Sharing one's opinion in a respectful way is possible. Less spectacle, so less eyeballs, but worth it. Try it.
nubg 2 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with his comparison? He explained what he meant by "a Belgium".
tanseydavid 29 minutes ago [-]
The entire side topic of guns and revolt seems misplaced in this thread.
The original Luddite movement arose in response to automation in the textile industry.
They committed violence. Violence was committed against them. All tragic events when viewed from a certain perspective.
My rhetorical question is this: did any of this result in any meaningful impedance of the "march of technological progress"?
bonsai_spool 2 hours ago [-]
> Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium.
I'm curious why you say this given you start by highlighting several characteristics that are not like Belgium (to wit, poor education, political media capture, effective oligarchy). I feel there are several other nations that may be better comparators, just want to understand your selection.
This is not false, but gives the wrong idea that foreigners are driving them in real time.
> After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.
> “They provide guidance,” he argued. “They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
themafia 19 minutes ago [-]
Dig deep enough into any "AI" idea and you'll find the bottom end of the scam looks exactly like this.
We've simply relabeled the "Mechanical Turk" into "AI."
The rest is built on stolen copyrighted data.
The new corporate model: "just lie the government clearly doesn't give a shit anymore."
Rendered at 19:19:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Google/Alphabet are so vertically integrated for AI when you think about it. Compare what they're doing - their own power generation , their own silicon, their own data centers, search Gmail YouTube Gemini workspace wallet, billions and billions of Android and Chromebook users, their ads everywhere, their browser everywhere, waymo, probably buy back Boston dynamics soon enough (they're recently partnered together), fusion research, drugs discovery.... and then look at ChatGPT's chatbot or grok's porn. Pales in comparison.
Google's been thinking about world models since at least 2018: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122
Using vision only is so ignorant of what driving is all about: sound, vibration, vision, heat, cold...these are all clues on road condition. If the car isn't feeling all these things as part of the model, you're handicapping it. In a brilliant way Lidar is the missing piece of information a car needs without relying on multiple sensors, it's probably superior to what a human can do, where as vision only is clearly inferior.
Boston Robotics is working on a smaller robot that can kill you.
Anduril is working on even smaller robots that can kill you.
The future sucks.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/i-tried-the-robot-tha...
[2] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...
Erm, a dishwasher, washing machine, automated vacuum can be considered robots. Im confused as to this obsession of the term - there are many robots that already exist. Robotics have been involved in the production of cars for decades.
......
Dictionary def: "a machine controlled by a computer that is used to perform jobs automatically."
But in my mind a waymo was always a "car with sensors", but more recently (especially having recently used them a bunch in California recently) I've come to think of them truly as robots.
Maybe we need to nitpick about what a job is exactly? Or we could agree to call Waymos (semi)autonomous robots?
Subtle brag that Waymo could drive in camera-only mode if they chose to. They've stated as much previously, but that doesn't seem widely known.
(edit - I'm referring to deployed Tesla vehicles, I don't know what their research fleet comprises, but other commenters explain that this fleet does collect LIDAR)
https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=872
They've also built it into a full neural simulator.
https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=1063
I think what we are seeing is that they both converged on the correct approach, one of them decided to talk about it, and it triggered disclosure all around since nobody wants to be seen as lagging.
Humans do this, just in the sense of depth perception with both eyes.
More subtly, a lot of depth information comes from how big we expect things to be, since everyday life is full of things we intuitively know the sizes of, frames of reference in the form of people, vehicles, furniture, etc . This is why the forced perspective of theme park castles is so effective— our brains want to see those upper windows as full sized, so we see the thing as 2-3x bigger than it actually is. And in the other direction, a lot of buildings in Las Vegas are further away than they look because hotels like the Bellagio have large black boxes on them that group a 2x2 block of the actual room windows.
Also subtle head and eye movements, which is something a lot of people like to ignore when discussing camera-based autonomy. Your eyes are always moving around which changes the perspective and gives a much better view of depth as we observe parallax effects. If you need a better view in a given direction you can turn or move your head. Fixed cameras mounted to a car's windshield can't do either of those things, so you need many more of them at higher resolutions to even come close to the amount of data the human eye can gather.
It's possible they get headaches from the focal length issues but that's different.
That was 2 generations of hardware ago (4th gen Chrysler Pacificas). They are about to introduce 6th gen hardware. It's a safe bet that it's much cheaper now, given how mass produced LiDARs cost ~$200.
> Then, in December 2016, Waymo received evidence suggesting that Otto and Uber were actually using Waymo’s trade secrets and patented LiDAR designs. On December 13, Waymo received an email from one of its LiDAR-component vendors. The email, which a Waymo employee was copied on, was titled OTTO FILES and its recipients included an email alias indicating that the thread was a discussion among members of the vendor’s “Uber” team. Attached to the email was a machine drawing of what purported to be an Otto circuit board (the “Replicated Board”) that bore a striking resemblance to – and shared several unique characteristics with – Waymo’s highly confidential current-generation LiDAR circuit board, the design of which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his resignation.
The presiding judge, Alsup, said, "this is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen. This was not small. This was massive in scale."
(Pronto connection: Levandowski got pardoned by Trump and is CEO of Pronto autonomous vehicles.)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/waymo-googles-se...
Tesla told us their strategy was vertical integration and scale to drive down all input costs in manufacturing these vehicles...
...oh, except lidar, that's going to be expensive forever, for some reason?
Humans do this with vibes and instincts, not just depth perception. When I can't see the lines on the road because there's too much slow, I can still interpret where they would be based on my familiarity with the roads and my implicit knowledge of how roads work, e.g. We do similar things for heavy rain or fog, although, sometimes those situations truly necessitate pulling over or slowing down and turning on your 4s - lidar might genuinely given an advantage there.
Why should you be able to do that exactly? Human vision is frequently tricked by it's lack of depth data.
2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.
IMO, access to DeepMind and Google infra is a hugely understated advantage Waymo has that no other competitor can replicate.
Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from there.
Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you into the input to your driving model being vision, which means that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data, which is wasteful.
https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-worl...
Discussed here,eg.
Genie 3: A new frontier for world models (1510 points, 497 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798166
Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds (673 points, 371 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812933
We started with physics-based simulators for training policies. Then put them in the real world using modular perception/prediction/planning systems. Once enough data was collected, we went back to making simulators. This time, they're physics "informed" deep learning models.
[1] I've seen a couple of them but they're not available to hire yet and are still very rare.
Or the most realistic game of SimCity you could imagine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg
Anyway, we'll see how the London rollout goes, but I get the impression London's got a lot more of those kinds of roads.
That is extremely narrow, I wonder why the city has not designated it as a one-way street? They've done that for other similarly narrow sections of the same street farther north.
"we’re excited to continue effectively adapting to Boston’s cobblestones, narrow alleyways, roundabouts and turnpikes."
edit: Case in point:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/xxYQWHrzSMES8HPL8
This is an alley in Coimbra, Portugal. A couple years ago I stayed at a hotel in this very street and took a cab from the train station. The driver could have stopped in the praça below and told me to walk 15m up. Instead the guy went all the way up then curved through 5-10 alleys like that to drop me off right right in front of my place. At a significant speed as well. It was one of the craziest car rides I've ever experienced.
Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.
As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get palpably angry at me for driving the route.
Not taking paying passengers yet though!
I started working heavily on realizing them in 2016 and it is unquestionably (finally) the future of AI
Talk about edge cases.
But, what would you do? Trust the Waymo, or get out (or never get in) at the first sign of trouble?
This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these vehicles.
It was on the home screen when I've taken it, and when I tested it, it seemed to pull to the first safe place. I don't trust the general pubic with a stop button.
Vivaldi 7.8.3931.63 on iOS 26.2.1 iPhone 16 pro
Edit: or are you talking about the allegations of workers in the Philippines controlling the Waymos: https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo... I guess both are valid.
I think you meant, "Attempt" to limit what people can do.
Driving in SF (for example) provides many opportunities to see "free will" exerted in the most extreme ways -- laws be damned.
https://cybernews.com/news/waymo-overseas-human-agents-robot...
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
[*] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...
Listen to the statement.
The operators help when the Waymo is in a "difficult situation".
Car drives itself 99% of the time, long tail of issues not yet fixed have a human intervene.
Everyone is making out like it's an RC car, completely false.
And apparently some people still haven't caught on.
Have a look if you don't believe me:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...
(1% of the time sounds like a lot of time when human lives are on the line, but I'm not clear who would be held responsible when death inevitably occurs.)
Having humans in the loop at some level is necessary for handling rare edge cases safely.
Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will introduce a whole host of new problems which are already solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
Trains need tracks, cars - already have the infrastructure to drive on.
> Self driving cars is a dead end technology, that will introduce a whole host of new problems which are already solved with public transit, better urban planning, etc.
Self driving cars will literally become a part of public transit
I’ve been hearing people say that for almost 15 years now. I believe it when I see it.
I'm willing to wager that you might not actually believe it at that point either.
I would be happy to bet on some strict definition of your claim.
The US already did it once (just in the wrong direction) by redesigning all cities to be unfriendly to humans and only navigable by cars. It should be technically possible to revert that mistake.
> Redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure isn't happening, look around.
We have been redesigning and rebuilding city transportation infrastructure since we had cities. Where I live (Seattle) they are opening a new light rail bridge crossing just next month (first rail over a floting bridge; which is technologically very interesting), and two new rail lines are being planned. In the 1960s the Bay area completely revolutionized their transit sytem when they opened BART.
I think you are simply wrong here.
66 years later we see California struggling terribly with implementation of a high-speed rail system -- where the placement/location of the infrastructure largely is targeted for areas far less dense than the Bay Area.
I don't think there is any single reason why this is so much more difficult now then it was in 1960 -- but clearly things have changed quite a lot in that time.
Same was said about electricity, or the internet.
As to the revolt, America doesn't do that any more. Years of education have removed both the vim and vigor of our souls. People will complain. They will do a TikTok dance as protest. Some will go into the streets. No meaningful uprising will occur.
The poor and the affected will be told to go to the trades. That's the new learn to program. Our tech overlords will have their media tell us that everything is ok (packaging it appropriately for the specific side of the aisle).
Ultimately the US will go down hill to become a Belgium. Not terrible, but not a world dominating, hand cutting entity it once was.
Sharing one's opinion in a respectful way is possible. Less spectacle, so less eyeballs, but worth it. Try it.
The original Luddite movement arose in response to automation in the textile industry.
They committed violence. Violence was committed against them. All tragic events when viewed from a certain perspective.
My rhetorical question is this: did any of this result in any meaningful impedance of the "march of technological progress"?
I'm curious why you say this given you start by highlighting several characteristics that are not like Belgium (to wit, poor education, political media capture, effective oligarchy). I feel there are several other nations that may be better comparators, just want to understand your selection.
> After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.
> “They provide guidance,” he argued. “They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
We've simply relabeled the "Mechanical Turk" into "AI."
The rest is built on stolen copyrighted data.
The new corporate model: "just lie the government clearly doesn't give a shit anymore."