Anthony Levandowski to Larry Page: Google's self-driving project is broken (2016)

https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1445802721014009859

by mfiguiere • 5 years ago

45 73 5 years ago

jpm_sd• 5 years ago

(2016)

Anthony Levandowski has since become infamous for his "move fast and break things" approach to life. But you can get away with a lot if there's a presidential pardon waiting for you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski

https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-did-trump-pardon.html

r00fus• 5 years ago

Pretty much solidifies my opinion of this guy. Someone who did clearly illegal and unethical things? This is the icing on the cake.

caslon• 5 years ago

Is it really clearly unethical? It's just messing with intellectual property laws. Pretty much every interesting innovation in history would involve messing with intellectual property laws, if the West's modern draconian ones were retroactively applied.

I don't like Levandowski (anyone who's worked at Google or Uber has perpetuated evil and he definitely paid his way to get that pardon), but it seems weird to claim that the thing people hate him for was actually unethical rather than just illegal.

johnthuss• 5 years ago

From 2016. For one, I appreciate Waymo's cautious approach that values human life more than business success, a la Tesla.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

Precisely. Five years on, Waymo is still working on the project and the company Levandowski left to go work for has pulled out of the market after an extremely high-profile fatality.

hunterb1232• 5 years ago

Or the fact that Waymo is no closer than they were when he criticized them is proof he was right. How is Waymo doing?

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

There's a very strong argument that the best way to save lives is whatever strategy advances self-driving technology the fastest.

30,000 Americans (and vastly more people worldwide) die each year from human-driving mistakes... let's not ignore the ongoing human cost of the status quo. Self-driving has the potential to cut that human toll to almost zero. We should not trap ourselves in a future where 1 self-driving mistake death is considered worse than a hundred thousand deaths from normal human mistakes.

jack_riminton• 5 years ago

Exactly. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

If one death is caused by Tesla's FSD should we ignore the fact that statistically it would have already saved x lives?

_jal2• 5 years ago

So in your analysis, how many people should robocars be killing? The easy answer is "anything less than 30K", right?

Somehow that case only looks "very strong" to people with a financial interest in the tech.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

When you factor in the human element, getting on the road as soon as possible may not actually be that strategy.

Uber had one fatality and is now out of the market. The public has very little stomach for error here. Multiple companies with multiple fatalities could shelve the whole industry indefinitely.

farnsworth• 5 years ago

The status quo is ridiculous, but we already have a better solution, dense cities and mass transit. We should be building trains using decades old tech, not AI bs. Of course I'm just shouting into the void but the dream of self driving cars is incredible over engineering and will take us backwards in the long run on the problem of global warming.

BlueDingo• 5 years ago

Wait, does everyone get a free Tesla with FSD at some point?

How does your solution spread to millions of drivers? I think if you actually want to start saving lives now (and not decades from now for FSD + policy change + phasing out), mandate real driving classes and tests for licensing.

Retric7• 5 years ago

Excessive caution also costs lives when it comes to self driving because it pushes adoption further into the future. Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk. Assuming Waymo’s system is significantly better than that it’s therefore safer than human drivers and thus should be deployed to save lives.

Of course that’s valuing everyone’s lives equally, there are some arguments to be made that slight improvements aren’t enough.

legolas2412• 5 years ago

Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates, though with different people at risk.

Unproven claim.

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

If the problem is millions of traffic accidents from individual human drivers then it will be far cheaper and faster to bet big on public transportation, high speed/light/etc. rail, instead of a fully autonomous self-driving car future that has always claimed to be just 5 years away (for the last 15 years).

ryandvm• 5 years ago

Tesla is overall near parity with human drivers in terms of casualty rates

Not it is not. It's on parity with human drivers IN IDEAL CONDITIONS. Autopilot is frequently flummoxed by rain, snow, or other high glare conditions.

It's kind of cheeky for these companies to claim their driver assist technologies have a better record than humans when they get to disengage every time the conditions are less than ideal. Humans don't have that option.

Hell, I could claim I'm an expert at anything as long as I get to tap out once I'm in over my head...

stingrae• 5 years ago

I read this very differently. This was coming off of the failure of Firefly (https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made...). The problem with it was that you couldn't have a safety driver in the car. So it would require level 5 ready software.

My interpretation of Levandowski, is that he is pitching the current waymo strategy, to get as many retrofitted vehicles on the road in the target market and collect a ton of training data. These human driven "self-driving" cars could pick up passengers while collecting the data so as to build up a customer base and service flow for the future service.

ra72• 5 years ago

Yeah, it seems like Waymo did end up following Levandowski's ideas and didn't try to build their own vehicles. They have the Waymo Driver now, which is supposed to be modular and can be upfitted to different types of cars/trucks with OEM partnerships.

misiti37804• 5 years ago

How many people have died because of Tesla FSD again? Let me check. zero.

trangus_1985• 5 years ago

Car accidents resulting in fatality are relatively uncommon, thanks to modern safety standards, and Tesla FSD doesn't have nearly as many miles as it needs.

Your sample size is way too small to be implying that FSD is safe - given a year or so, with millions more miles, we'll see what the score is.

By the way, and this is anecdotal, I was personally given a FSD demonstration a few weeks ago. The car immediately did an unsafe lane change in the middle of an intersection. Albeit, that was one of the pilot program beta versions.

javagram• 5 years ago

Several deaths, and more serious accidents, are attributed to Tesla Autopilot though, which Tesla marketing has confused customers into thinking is equivalent to FSD.

Compare Tesla’s initial approach (or lack thereof) to driver monitoring vs GM Super Cruise for instance.

Sohcahtoa82• 5 years ago

This is absolutely untrue, and trivial to verify.

Quick Edit: I suppose it's more accurate to say FSD hasn't killed anyone, but AP has, but given the current context, I'm not sure it's relevant.

nautilius• 5 years ago

You mean it hasn’t already killed anyone since its release - two weeks ago? I don’t know if that’s something to brag about…

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/25/tes...

soperj• 5 years ago

There have been 10 autopilot deaths last I checked.

debbiedowner• 5 years ago

Is your claim is that it's 0 because Tesla FSD doesn't exist?

Because if you Google "How many people have died because of Tesla FSD" it seems to be at least 10 according to tesladeaths.com . I also found a strange case of 2 deaths in Texas with no one in the driver's seat a few months ago.

vardump• 5 years ago

None, as FSD is not released yet. Currently they're testing City Streets module in a closed beta.

nostrademons• 5 years ago

That's not true. Just from memory, there was this crash:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-killed-in-...

Reuters reports about 10 Tesla fatalities directly attributable to Autopilot:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf...

dheera• 5 years ago

For one, I appreciate

Capitalism, and the stock market, on the other hand, doesn't appreciate it. It kills "cautious" companies and keeps alive companies that have a revenue model, even if that revenue model comes at the expense of safety.

35fbe7d3d5b92• 5 years ago

What does that say about capitalism?

_jal2• 5 years ago

Google to Anthony Levandowski: your ethics are too broken, even for us.

m0ngr31• 5 years ago

Let's not get ahead of ourselves...

rasz• 5 years ago

Bad title, email was about Google making custom cars.

cmurf3• 5 years ago

Levandowski is arguing in favor of retrofitting in order to deploy now, versus spending the time and money on future design with an unknown ship date. And he argues the hardware is good enough, it's the software that needs improving. It's approximately 180 degrees opposite of Tesla's strategy.

Is self-driving a mostly solved problem? I'm not even sure what the context is, long haul highway, or mixed (pedestrian, biking, non-self-driving autos)? Humans get confused with edge cases: poor road design, poor and non-standard signage, difficulty predicting other people's intentions in particular when human driver and pedestrian can't see each other's faces to know if they see each other as well as hand signaling to reduce the ambiguity, etc.

I come from an aviation background where the approximate equivalents for mixed city is VFR, and long haul standardized is IFR. And while the big expensive newer plans can do Cat IIIc with autoland in zero visibility: not everything is a Cat IIIc approach (there is no equivalent for take-off), and not every airport has the ground infrastructure to support such landings, and there's a whole area of ground operations that also aren't easily automated. Ergo, I use the best case scenario of IFR as the most likely environment in which we could have autonomous aircraft, and yet we don't. Andn that's when the environment is in normal positive control, as soon as there's no radar, compulsory reporting by a human pilot becomes required with IFR. What if weather forecast is off, and you need to fly to the alternate? What if there's loss of radio communications? All of these are accounted for by IFR, there's a written protocol pilots learn, but human pilots perform those actions. Not flight navigation systems or autopilots.

And from my point of view, the self-driving automobile problem is astronomically more complicated than IFR. Which is now where I come back full circle and opine that I think we're a long ways off from seeing "full self driving" (whatever that is) in anything other than very constrained, idealized (standardized) environments.

35fbe7d3d5b92• 5 years ago

I come from an aviation background where the approximate equivalents for mixed city is VFR, and long haul standardized is IFR.

Your subsequent paragraph is extremely interesting because you talk about how IFR is "easier to automate" – but, a layman's understanding of IFR vs VFR is "VFR is easy for humans, IFR kills bad pilots", so that first sentence threw me for a loop: "mixed city" is insanely hard over long haul trucking, why is it VFR?!

cmurf3• 5 years ago

s/IFR is easier to automate/IFR should be easier automate/ and that's mainly because the theory is that positive separation is neither the pilot nor autopilot's problem. And also the stricter standards constrain the environment. Separation is primarily the responsibility of pilots under VFR. In fact even on an IFR flight plan, in visual conditions, pilots are expected to maintain separation, hence the reporting of entering instrument meteorological conditions. It is the very thing humans are good at, visual analysis, that autonomous systems aren't good at. But if the need for visual analysis is taken off the table, that should make automation of IFR+IMC easier compared to VFR.

The analog for pedestrians might be radio communications. Try getting an autonomous system to understand non-standard jargon, which happens all the time among native English speaking pilots. Of course we should just have standardized communication without voice, thereby reducing ambiguity, but how to do deal with legacy? Again in aviation this would be easier to just say, no more voice radio communications - work for this is already in progress for some time. But get rid of pedestrians? How? And there's some historical point for comparison, when pedestrians had an absolute right to cross the road, with horse driven carriages and before the automobile. Once the automobile arrived, so did ticketing for jaywalking.

chrischen2• 5 years ago

Depends on what you are trying to solve. Personally I find improving level 2 assistance programs are much more useful. I’m actually able to use and benefit from OpenPilot on a daily basis, and all it does is lane keeping, but it does it so well.

cmurf3• 5 years ago

It's a really good point. Maybe we're allowing perfect to be the enemy of good. Where are the worst problems? The edge cases we want to fix? What are humans bad at that autonomous systems are better at? Probably top on that list is patience. Only humans get impatient, frustrated, and have emotional situations cloud their judgement.

timmg• 5 years ago

Shit, he was exactly right.

davio• 5 years ago

I would never be able to live down the internal shame of typing an email to a CEO with "We're loosing our tech advantage..."

jessaustin2• 5 years ago

Sometimes I suspect executives cultivate a sort of deliberate illiteracy as a way of keeping others off balance. I have received so many emails ending with the grating non-sentence "Please advice."

amackera• 5 years ago

Why's that?

Edit: ooooh the typo

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

hey when you're setting loose your tech advantage you definitely want to advise the CEO!

pao• 5 years ago

L,

God, what a douche.

jiveturkey• 5 years ago

This is (was) the common way to address Larry Page. Sergey is S.

That said, I'm not arguing that you're wrong.

darth_avocado• 5 years ago

Separating the messenger from the message is crucial here. Being around in the valley for far too long, I've seen the kind of leadership he is griping about. Focussing on the wrong things, shutting down great ideas, moving too slow and outright refusing to acknowledge failures. Eventually the competitors move up ahead and you fail to deliver. You either pull out of the market, continue building a mediocre product that sees a couple of years of "meh" adoption or you buy the competitor. All of which can be avoided.

_009• 5 years ago

One of the most brilliant engineers out there. A true madman with an old hacker mentality that is nowhere to be seen these days, except for maybe George Hotz...

Old days where different, today, it's about leetcode and being overly happy on zoom calls, and playing along investors playbooks... Capitalist only left the hoodies, and that's because another 100m funded startup from their portfolio are selling them.

Feeling nostalgic...

Anthony Levandowski to Larry Page: Google's self-driving project is broken (2016)

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