
Why deep learning won’t give us level 5 self-driving cars - wavepruner
https://bdtechtalks.com/2020/07/29/self-driving-tesla-car-deep-learning/
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natch
Elon isn't promising this for consumer cars in 2020. He's talking about
internal development vehicles. The author seems to have missed this
distinction, and then based large parts of the article on this
misunderstanding.

For me that's really the strongest plausible interpretation. There are other,
weaker interpretations such as the author is twisting the facts to suit an
agenda. I'm not even going there. I think the author has just bought into a
common meme about Elon "promising" things when he's really talking about in-
house development cars.

Also:

>But for the time being, deep learning algorithms don’t have such capabilities

I don't know how he is so confident about the absence of capabilities, when
he's not an insider. And the phrase "for the time being" is a tip-off that
even the author acknowledges that deep learning is still a developing field.

Tesla does have some interesting approaches. The article also doesn't mention
the hydranet, something Tesla has talked about publicly, which sounds to be a
fusion of multiple deep learning networks. In any case, I would look elsewhere
for insights about Tesla, unless the author can evolve his view to be more
open minded.

The article does have some good points about the challenges. I'm a skeptic as
well. But also very optimistic and curious to see where the tech and the
massive data will take us.

The mentioned problem of having a dearth of China data, well, that is being
chipped away at now.

It's certainly a more massive problem than the US driving environment… China
is insane. We visited a "this used to be secret, now it's not" huge super-wide
emergency backup military runway that was also used as a road and 1) for
pedestrian traffic 2) for ox carts 3) for freeway-speed traffic 4) for normal
speed local traffic 5) for bicycles and 6) for threshing wheat… they lay the
wheat out and let passing vehicles do the work of threshing it, with people
tending the process and walking out into the middle of the road/runway to
fetch the partially processed wheat. Just think all the edge cases in that one
environment alone. And that was just coastal China. It's a big country. The
data is going to be interesting.

