> Running in small areas shows that they can drive in small mapped out areas under specific conditions.
That is fully autonomous driving. It's just classified as Level 4. Geofences and operating conditions can be extended to provide a real, useful taxi service to a lot of people.
Not really. Like Karpathy mentioned in the latest lex episode, keeping an updated exact map of any area isn’t a scalable way to achieve this (which is what these geofenced services do) and isn’t how humans are able to drive.
It’s perfectly scalable and it’s a solved problem. Maps aren’t the bottleneck in scaling. The cars don’t even require an always up-to-date map to work safely (but they are self mapping anyway). I’m not sure how long Karpathy will push this narrative because Tesla isn’t able to afford mapping like the others.
Tesla also uses maps, it’s just less detailed. If humans are able to drive without maps, why does Tesla require a map of lane geometry, stop signs and intersections?
> keeping an updated exact map of any area isn’t a scalable way to achieve this (which is what these geofenced services do) and isn’t how humans are able to drive.
Humans combine low-res maps with extremely good visual odometry & spatial reasoning. Computers don't come close to the way humans reason about space & vision yet, so stronger priors help to make up the difference.
Making it scalable to keep an updated exact map of an area is part of the work L4 companies have been doing. I think it's hard for folks on the outside to really know just how much progress has been made here. Before Google Maps existed folks didn't think you could scalably map the world either.
It's not like companies like Cruise or Waymo want to keep doing this if they can help it. It's pretty disingenuous to say that these companies don't have any incentive to jump off the mapping wagon as soon as the tech to do so exists.
In fact, L4 companies do have to deal with areas they're driving where they see the map is outdated (often these are construction zones). So either they have mapless driving capabilities to handle these cases, or they do something else (seems like Cruise cars love pulling over en masse, lol)
That is fully autonomous driving. It's just classified as Level 4. Geofences and operating conditions can be extended to provide a real, useful taxi service to a lot of people.
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