We are going to need a fundamental breakthrough in AI to achieve the level of FSD that people expect. Like a convolutional neural network level breakthrough.
The problem with Tesla's approach has always been that Elon wanted to sell it before he actually knew anything about how to solve it. It's lead to series of compounding errors in Tesla's approach to AVs.
The vehicle's sensor suite is woefully inadequate and its compute (yes, even with the fancy Tesla chip) is woefully underpowered... all because Elon never really pushed to figure out where the boundary of the problem was. They started with lane-keeping on highways where everything is easy and pre-sold a "full self-driving" software update with absolutely no roadmap to get there.
To overcome the poor sensor suite and anemic compute, they've boxed themselves into having to invent AGI to solve the problem. Everyone else in the space has happily chosen to spend more on sensors and compute to make the problem computationally tractable, because those things will easily get cheaper over time.
I'm fairly convinced that if Tesla wants to ship true FSD within the next decade, the necessary sensor and compute retrofit would nearly bankrupt the company. The only way out is likely to slowly move the goal posts within the legalese to make FSD just a fancy Level 2 driver assist and claim that's always what it was meant to be.
I mean they trained pigeon's to guide bombs in WW2.
Even wanting to do things vision only is ok, but the cars simply don't have enough cameras for redundancy. You are a little rain or mud away from having a system that no longer operates.
At this point it's pretty obvious none of the original "FSD ready" cars Tesla shipped will be able to handle L4/L5 autonomy hardware-wise. Arguably none of the cars currently rolling off the line will be either - others have made the point in the thread: while nobody has really cracked autonomy fully, other players (see: Waymo, Cruise) are clearly much further along with a very different sensor and compute suite than anything Tesla has shipped or currently ships.
L4 autonomy is where the vehicle is fail-safe. It cannot handle all conditions, but is able to recognize conditions it cannot handle and hand control back to the driver. Importantly if the driver is not responsive to takeover the vehicle can put itself into a safe state (mostly just means pulling over in a safe place). L4 is the minimum at which you can be fully distracted from driving.
I don't think Tesla has a viable path to L4 using its current hardware...
Wasn’t there recently a medical testing company that completely blew up, with associated felony charges, for attempting this sort of strategy?
It could be applied here to test if we are getting closer or further from what humans can do.
Some examples:
Smoke Test 1:
Driving with Snow
Smoke Test 2:
Driving with Rain
Smoke Test 3:
You are driving to a Red sign and you notice 50 meters ahead a pedestrian has its headphones on. The pedestrian is distracted and looking at traffic coming from the other way. You notice from the pedestrian gait and demeanor its probably going to cross anyway and its not noticing you. So you instinctively slowly reduce your speed and keep a sharp eye on its next action.
Smoke Test 4:
Keep eye contact with a Dutch cyclist as they look at you across a roundabout. You realize they will cross in front of your car, so you already inferred their intentions. Today the cyclist bad humor will not make them raise their hand or make any other signs to you other than an angry face. You however already know they will push forward...
Smoke Test 5:
A little soccer ball just run across your vision field. You hit the breaks hard, as you instinctively think a child might show up any second running after it.
Failing any of these scenarios would make you fail the driving license exam so I guess its the minimum we should aim for. Call me back when any AI is able to even start tackling ANY of these, much less All of these scenarios. :-)
slecht humeur? That's "bad mood".
See second definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor
Once we take proper inventory of where we are at, we may find that we are still so far off the mark that we would be inclined to throw away all of our current designs and start over again from (new) first principles.
The notion that you can iteratively solve the full-self-driving problem on the current generation of cars is potentially one of the bigger scams in tech today (at least as marketed). I think a lot of people are deluding themselves about the nature of this local minima. It is going to cost us a lot of human capital over the long haul.
Being wrong and having to start over certainly sucks really badly, but it is still better than the direction we are currently headed in.
As a model Y owner, I'm quite skeptical about this generation of vehicles being able to truly hit the mark on FSD.
"Just because we can put a man on the Moon does not mean we can put a man on the Sun" :-)