I'm not an expert in the LLM space, but I'm an external contributor to comma.ai's openpilot project and I'm and quite familiar with how its controls work, so I looked from that perspective. There's two questions here:
1) Could a cloud-delivered LLM figure out how to drive this route, based on those input data and given access to those output actuators? Looks like yes. Sure.
2) Could this work in the real world? Absolutely not. Three reasons: latency, latency, and latency.
openpilot's driving model updates the target curvature and acceleration at 20Hz. Every millisecond of the round trip time through every piece of its entirely-local driving stack is well-understood, extremely consistent, and tightly optimized. It has to be, otherwise you can't react to even minor bumps or wind gusts, much less rapidly-developing traffic situations.
Adding even a single speed of light RTT to a cloud service is meaningfully bad, and you'll need a whole lot more to encode and upload camera imagery to even start the time-to-LLM-response clock, and then send the response back down. By then the world around the car has moved on.
There's a reason Tesla and every other self-driving manufacturer need the compute hardware in the car.
Great point! Yeah latency was one of the biggest issues here. To cope with that (and for safety reasons) the cars are driving at extremely low speeds. They also get timestamps with every tool call output etc so they can, in theory, "in context learn" about their own latency and choose motion durations and control how fast their iteration loop is to some extent. But yeah, this is just sort of a fun benchmark to see how good frontier LLMs are out-of-the-box at driving a real car, and probably not actually practical any time soon.
To clarify my parent comment, I think it was an interesting experiment and seems like it was done well, and it may well be informative about what various frontier LLMs could do with recorded or world model footage.
My only point is to say this sort of experiment is where it ends. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI will be coming out with a "drive your car from the cloud" subscription until we have FTL communication, meaning never.
My understanding is that Waymo's remote driving is not direct control of the car, for exactly these reasons among others. So human operators don't have steering wheels or joysticks. Instead the humans can give something closer to advice (e.g., "pull to the right and stop") that the car can accept, modify, or reject.
The car always has to be capable of driving safely and avoiding collisions locally. The human operators are being asked occasionally to help with some higher level, longer term decisions. As a random example, if there's foreign objects blocking the road, the car has to be able to stop itself before hitting them, but it might phone-home to a human to decide if a u-turn is appropriate.
jyoung8607 · · focus · HN ↗
1) Could a cloud-delivered LLM figure out how to drive this route, based on those input data and given access to those output actuators? Looks like yes. Sure.
2) Could this work in the real world? Absolutely not. Three reasons: latency, latency, and latency.
openpilot's driving model updates the target curvature and acceleration at 20Hz. Every millisecond of the round trip time through every piece of its entirely-local driving stack is well-understood, extremely consistent, and tightly optimized. It has to be, otherwise you can't react to even minor bumps or wind gusts, much less rapidly-developing traffic situations.
Adding even a single speed of light RTT to a cloud service is meaningfully bad, and you'll need a whole lot more to encode and upload camera imagery to even start the time-to-LLM-response clock, and then send the response back down. By then the world around the car has moved on.
There's a reason Tesla and every other self-driving manufacturer need the compute hardware in the car.
aditya-ramabadr · · focus · HN ↗
-Aditya, Tobias, Simon
jyoung8607 · · focus · HN ↗
My only point is to say this sort of experiment is where it ends. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI will be coming out with a "drive your car from the cloud" subscription until we have FTL communication, meaning never.
Xmd5a · · focus · HN ↗
rented_mule · · focus · HN ↗
jyoung8607 · · focus · HN ↗