[Lex:] Elon Musk is confident
that large scale data
and deep learning can solve
the autonomous driving problem.
What are your thoughts on
the limits and possibilities
of deep learning in this space?
[Yann:] Well it's obviously
part of the solution.
I mean, I don't think we'll
ever have a self-driving system
or at least not in the foreseeable future
that does not use deep learning.
Let me put it this way.
So in the history of engineering
particularly sort of AI-like systems,
there's generally a first phase
where everything is built by hand,
and then there is a second phase,
and that was the case
for autonomous driving,
you know 20, 30 years ago.
There's a phase where a little
bit of learning is used,
but it is a lot of
engineering that's involved
in taking care of corner cases
and putting limits, etc,
because their learning
system is not perfect.
Then as technology progresses,
we end up relaying more and more learning.
That's the history of character recognition,
it's the history of speech recognition,
computer vision, natural language processing.
And I think the same is going to happen
with autonomous driving that currently
the methods that are closest to providing
some level of autonomy, some
distant level of autonomy,
where you don't expect
a driver to do anything,
is where you constrain the world.
So you only run within
your 100 square kilometers,
or square miles in Phoenix
where the weather in nice
and the roads are wide,
which is what Waymo is doing.
You completely over-engineer the car
with tons of lidars and
sophisticated sensors
that are too expensive for consumer cars,
but they're fine if you just run a feat.
And you engineer the hell
out of everything else,
you map the entire world
so you have complete 3D
model of everything, so the only thing
that the perception system
needs to take care of
is moving objects and construction
and things that weren't in your map.
Then you can engineer a good SLAM system,
all that stuff, right?
So that's kind of the current approach
that's closest to some level of autonomy,
but I think eventually
the long- term solution
is going to rely more and more on learning
and possibly using a combination
of self-supervised learning
and model-based reinforcement learning
or something like that.
