The parts on deep SfM and VIDAR are fascinating because from a purely technical perspective you could interchange those slides from Anguelov’s talk with slides on visual depth perception from a Karpathy talk and you wouldn’t spot the difference.
It’s a reminder that cars with lidar vs. cars without lidar are not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. Namely, the degree of perceptual redundancy.
The difference between the “lidar is unnecessary” camp (primarily Tesla but also others) and the “lidar is necessary camp” is a difference in opinion about whether a vehicle without lidar will have redundant enough perception.
Moreover, what is redundant enough is not a purely technical opinion, but also an ethical, political, sociological, and business opinion. What is redundant enough depends on what is safe enough, and what is safe enough is a divisive issue.
For instance, Elon has said he considers a 10x lower rate of fatalities, injuries, and collisions than the human average to be safe enough for an autonomous vehicle. By contrast, Amnon Shashua has explicitly argued that autonomous vehicles must be 1,000x safer than the human average or else, he believes, there will be so much public outcry when crashed happen that autonomous vehicles will be rejected by society.
Waymo’s leadership has evaded an explicit answer to the “safe enough” question, but I would guess from multiple kinds of indications that the company wants to err on the side of extreme caution.
If Waymo wants lidar to provide redundancy for cameras and not replace cameras, then Waymo has to solve the same computer vision problems as Tesla, including visual depth perception. That’s why Anguelov’s and Karpathy’s technical talks have so much overlap on the topics of VIDAR and deep SfM.