(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
(Also former Cruise employee)
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving?
As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.
2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc.
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
ZuLuuuuuu•2h ago
Nice abbreviation.
plmpsu•2h ago