The bitter lesson is finally coming for the self-driving cars. The vision stack, 3D maps, lane selection grammar, occupancy networks, it’s maybe all about to give way to a single GPT looking at camera feeds and predicting the next steering wheel adjustment.
It’s mostly a latency problem at this point. The models are too big to run locally, but given that open-weight models like Qwen already exist, an open-weight, low latency equivalent to Astra can’t be too far out.
Tesla's already solved this - their vision model does this phenomenally well.
And they've demonstrated adding a sidecar LLM to it as well, mostly for these kinds of "read these 3 street signs, what should i do next?" sort of situations.
The same Tesla that pulled radar to go vision only and a person was killed because the vision model didn't recognize a truck? <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36680043" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36680043
From this year <a href="https://www.autoweek.com/news/a70794762/nhtsa-escalates-probe-tesla-fsd/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autoweek.com/news/a70794762/nhtsa-escalates-prob...
From that same article - "The agency said it has identified nine crashes potentially linked to the issue, including one fatality and two involving injuries. It is also reviewing six additional crashes that may be related."
Fifteen crashes - though not to be trivialized - is not a damning number at all in this context. What's more, per the article it's unconfirmed that the crashes are related, so it's hardly fitting to dismiss Tesla's approach based on this.
I think it's great that serious efforts are being made in different approaches to autonomous driving - and in this thread's context, it seems possible that Tesla's approach might eventually be revealed as the optimal approach given modern AI.
valine · · focus · HN ↗
It’s mostly a latency problem at this point. The models are too big to run locally, but given that open-weight models like Qwen already exist, an open-weight, low latency equivalent to Astra can’t be too far out.
atonse · · focus · HN ↗
And they've demonstrated adding a sidecar LLM to it as well, mostly for these kinds of "read these 3 street signs, what should i do next?" sort of situations.
matt_heimer · · focus · HN ↗
Not sure that counts as phenomenally well.
danielklnstein · · focus · HN ↗
matt_heimer · · focus · HN ↗
danielklnstein · · focus · HN ↗
Fifteen crashes - though not to be trivialized - is not a damning number at all in this context. What's more, per the article it's unconfirmed that the crashes are related, so it's hardly fitting to dismiss Tesla's approach based on this.
I think it's great that serious efforts are being made in different approaches to autonomous driving - and in this thread's context, it seems possible that Tesla's approach might eventually be revealed as the optimal approach given modern AI.