comma ai Breaking down hype of CES

Key Takeaways

good morning scopies good morning so you know um i work in the uh self-driving car industry so as part of this is kind of gonna be my my industry commentary i've been spending the morning watching some of our uh competitors videos and i'll give you kind of what my thoughts are on them um so maybe we'll start with this one so this is the mo lacking sleep now i slept pretty well last night good morning um so this is the mobile ikea in terms of ikea chick uh i try to watch all these things a little bit sped up so i actually performed um so mobile i actually is one of the least hypey players in the game um no no ico no no ico um well was actually one of the least hypey players in the game and they announced a few interesting things in this in this presentation um so first off they're going back to the aftermarket um let's see if we can find where it is they have this thing called the mobilei connect eight and it looks suspiciously like a neon here like a ram in the aftermarket why you don't programming i do a lot of programming so yeah this is this is this is an interesting play for mobile i like they're they're selling an aftermarket thing to fleets and so if you guys don't know there's a company called nada which is doing something similar um so natto builds this little uh camera thing i believe it has a snapdragon 820 in it they can push them out and it's kind of like a cloud-based dash cam really very similar to ours um i met with them at ces uh last year i visited their little booth and actually spoke with uh gabby holdsworth travis kalaknik's ex-girlfriend so that was kind of interesting but yeah so let's go back to this mobile i also announced i mean to be honest their 2018 plans look very similar to ours and i don't know if i should be happy about this or concerned by this um but they talk about level two plus you can go to sleep yeah they have they have a really good idea so they show on the left side they're showing a map so these these lanes here are coming from the map and these lanes are coming from sensing so we're going to roll out pretty much the exact same thing we're going to have our own uh comet eye hd maps which we're going to open source before the end of the year um and they'll have they'll have lanes in them and they'll have features to do precise localization and then kind of you know where to drive from the map so mobile is calling this level two plus they're talking about doing traffic lights in the exact same way we are um ahmad has a quote where he literally says look the hard part's not detecting the traffic light the hard part is figuring out what traffic lights apply to you and that's of course true um is it lagging on my own wi-fi from one wi-fi so yeah there's that now i can't find a better video uh for lift lift and app tape so first off um to understand aptive uh used to be delphi so they've kind of rebranded their self-driving division in the same way google rebranded their self-driving division as waymo um so lyft and active bring robo taxis to ces and a lot of companies have announced partnerships with lyft um the truth about these partnerships is my understanding is like there's no lift technology being used basically whenever someone announces a partnership with lyft all that means is that they're putting their cars on the lift network effectively they're signing up their autonomous cars with safety drivers to be lyft drivers um you know we have this obviously no partnership we have quite a few people with with with open pilot driving for uh driving on the lyft and uber networks so i'm important to be clear about what that showing um that's not the car i've seen them have before before they used to have like suv like things it's a bmw interesting they always focus on experience i'm not exactly sure why this is view is the difficult part so what delphi had last year was lidars around their car i think it's pretty much the same thing what's important to look at is their displays because if they have any display at all you can glean a whole lot of subtle so let's see what this is here we have a uh that looks like a valentine puck um and then we have a camera there and they probably have a radar in there as well that you can't see behind the plastic i don't know about the autopilot alexa so here's another puck in the i think that's a puck i mean i guess it could be a different lighter i don't know okay so let's let's break this down um so it looks like what they're doing is they've kind of i don't know crowdsource those lane things this looks very similar to the display that uh that delphi showed last time they clearly have a lidar in the car because these dots here are coming from the lidar see that these dots on the back of the car from the lidar um they're tracking their lead car very explicitly they have a traffic light here it's not connection to other cars i promise you it's not that actually as far as like actual demos go uh delphi active shows pre usually the most impressive one at ces completes the center set on the car and it turns a really consistent passenger experience so you so the experience doesn't matter this is what's interesting um they have this thing up here called called manual i'm not sure how much i can uh can say about this because i have actually been for a ride in this car it's interesting that they've switched to bmws too that must be because of the well they're not they're not mobile eye are they um do i have orientation lock no i turn it off um but yeah so any any more things people saw at ces that we kind of want to break down this is kind of just a chill i don't have that much um behavioral cloning doesn't work but we have a solution to it uh i'm not gonna go too much into the details of that but if the new models work the new models are going to be insanely good because they're not going to require much automatic ground truthing at all i mean the automatic ground treater is much simpler which a lot of the bugs that exist in open pilot where it like drifts out of a lane they're bugs in the automatic ground truther uh so let's check out let's check out ai motive i wrote in their car last year at ces they don't have any sort of nds with them or anything so we can we can say whatever we want about them i generally like ai motive look i'm being nice to people on this periscope um no no no no no they don't have are they at ces 20 ces 2018 and if anyone's any companies they want to shout out in the comments we'll kind of go through them automotive will showcase progress this is useless i want videos videos no that was last year's demo oh here we go ammo at ces day one so this is the first time i've seen any of these yeah they had the same stand last year it's pretty nice stand [Music] but this isn't anything show me an actual demo um we can also break down if you guys haven't watched the uh the nvidia event um the nvidia event is uh is interesting as well let's see what is this no this is old um let's see what they're saying here so nvidia's announcing these new these new uh these new hardware things um now my view on it basically is kind of like why is nvidia gonna win well the thing about nvidia is they're just not going to lose everybody every same car manufacturer right now should be buying nvidia's latest hardware sticking it in their car and making sure they can ota it seems like tesla's the only one actually smart enough to do this but when you look at these things that nvidia has um okay so first off they show it they show a demo of a car driving they show a seven mile drive demo um which maybe i think they show it like at the end i don't know what any of this means uber but they did show a demo good morning let's see we're just going through we're going we're busting hype with scobys um yeah okay so they do this they do this eight mile autonomous route uh to new jersey the hardware is not too expensive unless you're an auto manufacturer it's just kind of useless like there's no reason that you're better off using nvidia's dedicated hardware over using like a computer with an nvidia gpu we're height busting with scopies um so they have this eight mile autonomous route we were looking at what it's um they don't really show it they show it running on like their little thing too my guess is it's highly localization based and then they probably have like it's probably all localization um and then you can just use any sort of like yolo net to detect uh the cars let's see let's that's a good video to look at video eight mile route youtube yeah kf on the board is for the kalman filter which um nvidia yes 2018 how is how is the kalman filter integration coming yeah well the computer runs live it works well no but we got it we got to integrate it into that into the unit line that's got to go we got to do that good all right so here here we go perfect right good click um so we can look at yeah okay so let's look at let's look at this this uh like on-screen display right here they also i love when they do this they didn't blur out their screen so the screen is actually down here so it is running on driveworks um [Music] let's see if we can get any information about what it's doing so that lane that line is very smooth i really doubt that that's coming from vision i think it has to be coming from localization um so you know we talk about these cars they're actually really just line following robots um so it it line follows well on the turns it's usually a real giveaway whether it's vision based or not no i mean the trick is to find something that is not even in the visual scene like this is how you can bust drive that ai video is appallingly bad um so they're driving here uh that little inch forward at the stop sign and people think oh that's tricky behavior no it's just hard-coded and like this the the like the demo route that they do and then they localize they probably use a bit of vision to localize too i don't see lidars on the car um so the way companies like crews are doing it is they have wider maps built up what you want me watching this you want you got work to though you got you got to make our version of that work what no but know your enemy yeah we go over this stuff all the time um we don't go over it with the scopies uh so yeah they're not showing vehicle detection and stuff the real way to really bust these people is to ex to extract their video and play it in real time yeah it's i mean it's all about hype right it's all about showing hypey demos we might even have a hypey demo plant who wants to see comma level four right oh oh which reminds me okay you ready for the worst one um let's see if we can find the renault level 4 video we've been making fun of this one around the office um ah yes here we go okay so l symbios oh oh just showed a self-driving car tempo whose headlights change color when it's self-driving you know that's bad now there's actually a video of them driving with the journalist in this car and uh okay that's my lady right there um this this one's bad well so a few things are bad about it um all right wow wow look at that you can you can set the music with your phone wow it's the future all right um so maybe this isn't the one i saw the one that they show good morning we're height busting with scopies we're going to we're going through our competitors ces videos um i'm trying to find that renault level 4 video the really bad one um it was like car talk they they actually let a journalist sit in the driver's seat which was kind of interesting um so you think it's almost real but uh maybe it's this one i should have you know what i should i should prepare better for these periscopes this is all hype yeah oh wow look he's wearing vr headset um so a few things about this one there is actually a oh yeah yeah it's zero one night yeah linus tech tips drove in it come on youtube search come through for me oh yeah wow well it's really like look at how there's like a thing around the car this is like a logan paul move man this can ignore the safety yeah convenience advantage so a well into doing right now should definitely be illegal while it handles complicated tasks like maintaining an appropriate speed and following distance relative to other cars merging and without some significance so a few things look right there do you see that guy in the passenger seat he is driving the car he literally has his hand on a joystick driving the car this is not a level 4 autonomous car this is putting a driver in the passenger seat right this is absurd guys it's the current year that we still let companies get away with this kind of stuff like he's driving and the crisp there's another video where you see all the surround cars actually being renault cars as well they put the sensors in other cars this is a completely fake demo um but no no no really really look look look the guy's got his his hand look at look look at his hand right there it's on a joystick it's not for security reasons you have security reasons uh you know you have like an e-stop for security reasons right you don't have a joystick which the guy is constantly like look he's got his hand he's like moving it while the car drives um so this one this this one drove me crazy um we're going back a little bit but i'll actually show you one of the demos that's uh that's more impressive than than almost everything coming out uh today go to auto x um so this is a famous princeton computer vision guy we're looking at this one again yesterday so this one it is hard-coded paths but they actually did it using cheap cameras um so you can see the two cameras on the front there my understanding is they're running orb slam and they're using orb slam to localize and then they're just following the path with that which is pretty cool actually that they actually made that work uh torque robotics i've heard that name let's check it out let's let's go through what they might have um is a leader in game changing remote control who road ready can i buy one oh let's watch the video oh i love watching videos cabana is zero day man i always want to be one of those like youtube guys who just watches other people's youtube videos and comments on them right do they have sound oh okay i don't think that they need a better video editing to even we put sound in our videos um i don't know this doesn't really show you anything like okay they put a lidar on the roof by the way always watch out for this and you know i like them for the most part but um like voyage is notorious about this voyage will focus extensively on what their car looks like um for reference those who don't know voyage no i i like the guy um but voyage all right wow well they're actually the first hit for wow that's pretty good of them um but yeah like they're big on the optics of self-driving and maybe not so big on the actual technology you can build something that looks really impressive all that takes is money the actual working technology is what's hard to build right if if they're ever focusing on like the user story it's probably because they don't have the technology so again we really have to give credit to mobileye who gave a great talk about what's actually possible i mean i think he's fed up with the hype too i think he's he's fed up with the you know come on all right hey man i know what i'm wrong i'll change my opinion um but yeah so they're talking about this this level two plus stuff front facing camera plus road book i'm so road book is what mobile eye calls their hd maps but the thing about their hd maps which is way better than everybody else's is they're being made by the crowd just like ours you got to do it this way it's the only way to scalably build hd maps like the companies right now that are spending millions of dollars to build maps um notorious ones are like deep map and tom tom um like what they're spending tons and tons of vc money on is building 3d maps of the world there isn't really a reason to do this because building the map it's not useful unless you can localize in the map right so you build a lidar map in the world so this is this is this is all cruise does um cruz has built a cruise automation well they're not the first hit for cruz but voyage is the first hit for voyage get on the seo bros you know you know i kind of like cruz i mean they were right i tore apart their investor deck because i hate things like that but uh yeah so what cruise is actually doing i don't show anything here but um they built a very precise lidar localizer so we talked about delphi delphi is active um delphi has one of the most impressive actually shippable uh demos they're using well shippable is questionable they're using a lot of sensors they're fusing them well together i mean they're good at everything you would expect like a a a car oem to be good at but yeah as far as oem's going you know i've met with the delphi guys they're nice they're trying um they're much much better than like like bosh uh bosh has i met with the bosch guy so of uh you know hopeless right um why does schiffer not work and i ran we didn't do anything special to make it work or not work and maybe if i put extra work in to make it work that's illegal so i'm not sure we're gonna do that um self-driving lift first ride is this recent yeah okay perfect the verge is pretty good let's watch this scene and i'm about to do what else ride in a cell phone this guy that's not driving cars oh so this demo was in this demo last year the nvidia demo the nvidia demo was cute um i did talk about how they cheat though you see those buildings so this is it's a neural net maybe they have the same demo setup um so first off this is a this is a ford fusion by the way whenever you see a ford fusion self-driving car understand that this was not actually built by the company um it's sold by a company called autonomous stuff see i have a keyboard with no letters so it's kind of hard to type so whenever you see a self-driving car company with a ford fusion it's built by this company autonomous stuff or or lincoln mkz it's the same car um and then the buy wire is from this company called data speed so these th this is the pick axis of uh of self-driving cars yeah but when you go to the nvidia oh it was that where was that let's close some of these things um not deep map bye-bye d-map oh torque yeah i don't know i don't really think much of torque i haven't like seen anything from them here here it is yeah so they're using they're using the buildings they're using the build outputting the policy directly so they probably had someone drive like 20 test laps and then they they trained up a uh a a deep net i'm very similar to if you've seen diy robo cars um diy robocars is a bunch of people getting together in oakland who do these [Music] yeah so this is uh this is octavio good it's a famous deep learning guy um but yeah he basically just directly trained given the car sees this this is what the network should have but yeah it's it's the same thing as dave net basically um so let's go back to this video but yeah they're really cheating with the buildings and the way that you know this is they have a they have a screen inside the car that shows you what the activations are for the neural network i probably wouldn't have picked up on it if they didn't have this visualization thing but the buildings make this task um easier than it should be because their camera doesn't have a wide field of view it doesn't actually have a wide enough field of view to make this turn is there a ces every year but you know i like in videos the truth is nvidia is another one of these companies that's going to succeed almost even if they have no software if you have a car company right now you're so dumb for not sticking nvidia hardware hooked up to your cameras in your car uh our rav4 has four cameras and i'm sure it's hooked up to a processor like you know that's from like the mid-2000s gonna be different this is not just a self-driving ride around a parking lot or around the convention center this is the result of a partnership this is too slow yeah okay well i don't know why they all re-brand like this you can hear yes all right so you get in i can't believe journalists like fall for this kind of crap too you put like a like old display in the back doesn't matter it's all localization based okay i mean what's really important to look at here is you can ignore all the crap just look at their display because their display and like little subtleties in the car give away a ton of stuff um so yeah i mean these dots here are done with lidar you see they're visualizing this light here as green they're probably detecting that out here so the way that they're doing lights is they have all the lights hand coded in the map and then they're uh oh it's not cool come on tech is cool flashy devils oh we stuck the screen in the car and they press go and then the driver actually stepped on the gas pedal come on guys all right come on stop with the gimmicks um all right they put waze on the screen let's see what's real here histogram yeah they are good about not having having wobbly stuff uh but they're not using the lane lines they're using localization okay so that one's kind of interesting um you can see when they do that lane change their lanes snap from the left right to the the other ones i think they're using mobile eye for that um osm has almost all the light maps so yeah the it's a it's a having the knowing which intersection the light is at is not useful you have to know with a very high level of precision where to stop and where the light actually is in like free space right um all right i think we're done people are coming into work uh oh yeah no from what i've heard like they have serious meetings where they talk about us um and they're like what are we gonna do about kama i mean because we're not you know you can't buy me out uh we will you start using the camera for stopping around like to detect them but figuring out where to stop is hard you don't have to go but anymore i'll flip you guys back around uh everyone's coming into work so i should uh i should sign off but yeah do i think these companies consider comma competitor yeah i do um no and you know we're dark horse right like every other company you know you think oh well we could just partner with them no like you can't partner with me you have to be honest with me you have to be like straightforward i'm not down to like join this little cabal of why don't we all sit here while the technology doesn't progress i'm here to make the technology progress you know mobileye want to watch one of the best talks in self-driving cars um watch the cvpr mobilei keynote it really is great and you know i've never seen mobile like do anything like that before i i always wonder if like the fall the mobile i test the falling out um had something to do with with influencing uh mobile i'd actually go and do that but uh yeah thanks for joining um i'll be a little more organized for the next one of these but i think um shout out to all the companies out there you're not gonna get away with hype anymore we're we're really here to bust the hype we're really like if you if you try to get away with posting a video of i'll tear you apart i'll tear you apart because hype is doing no good for this field um it's putting money in the wrong places it's putting hope in the wrong places it's making the wrong partnerships we are here to destroy hype hey hey you know 9-1-1 is bad anyone who talks about that banned um how big is my dk large my donkey kong is is real large man um no truth but hype hype is down with hype this is 2018. we're not going to stand for it you know what the kamehame motto is for this year join us or die and when i say join us i don't mean partner with us i mean like if you're a mapping company out there right now i'm a hater oh i'm a hater no i said we're busting fake news man i have deep love for technology and for making things that actually work we do offer internships um summer internships apply uh give me give me a job at uh common.ai hey man i just want this stuff to work you know and that's that's kind of what we're here to do um so your fake news get ready to be uh to be chopped up renault i see you with that joystick in the passenger seat right um that's that's maybe the ultimate joker award and maybe the uh mobileye gets the uh true to life award all right cool thanks for joining team comma yeah team comma yeah join our team bro team comma bro team combo we are the strongest self-driving car team on the internet thank you for joining me in this periscope i love yelling it feels great i know why logan paul does this uh peace out