Tesla FSD Timeline
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Five years later it still does practically nothing. The car can’t even do the bare minimum: it doesn’t recognize speed limits on most highways in Finland because it gets confused by round LED signs showing the limit (these are used because it’s different in winter and summer). It’s just embarrassing. A self-driving car should understand road signs that a five-year-old has no difficulty reading.
I’m guessing it works better on some Californian roads that have been carefully hand-tuned by Tesla so they can show the Boss an illusion of progress.
Personally I’m not going to buy another Tesla after this episode. Optimism is one thing, but this level of hype is actively dangerous because it gives people the wrong idea about the capabilities of something they rely on in traffic.
Is the speed limit emitted by LEDs? Why is it ever different between winter and summer? Etc.
If the sign is not white background,no LEDs, and black or red font I as a human would ignore the signage just like the car is probably trained for as that isn't reflective of North America standards.
Because road conditions are different.
We have these variable limit LED signs in the US, too. https://wjla.com/amp/news/local/virginia-electronic-speed-li...
> that isn't reflective of North America standards
But they make and sell them outside North America.
It’s fine if the car is trained for North American standards only. Why then is Tesla marketing and selling this feature in Europe at all? What did I get for 7,500 euros?
I’m sure they have fine print in the contract saying “we don’t guarantee this feature will ever do anything.” So I’m taking it as an expensive lesson.
EDIT: I think the limit is only 5000 for small claim, but you dont need to go the small claim route, its just super easy to do so.
Secondly, road regulations are not dependent on what you personally know or are used to. A driver in Finland, even if they are coming from America, has the obligation of following all Finnish road markings. And if Tesla is selling FSD in Finland, it is obvious that they have the same obligation as any other road participant.
Harsh conditions + dark winter means that we have lower max limits in the winter. (i.e. 120km/h -> 100km/h, 100 -> 80)
The signs are pretty obvious to humans, though: https://moottori.fi/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/muuttuva-nope...
The speed limit signs are LEDs. In real life they are much brighter than they appear in photos ('cause LED). https://maps.app.goo.gl/29Mg7HaqFeAi2L639
>Why is it ever different between winter and summer?
Because doing 120kph on an icy road or in heavy rain is a recipe for disaster. Northern Europe isn't California. The temperature ranges from +30C to -30C during the year.
> I as a human would ignore the signage
Why?
Although those pictures probably illuminate (heh) the problem the Teslas are facing in determining the active speed limit.
> Why?
Because hamburgers, bald eagles, nonsensical date ordering, AR15s and imperial units demand it!
Aside: I'm not a fan of so many new cars with flickering taillights. I know most people can't see this effect, but many can.
Why should cars sold in other territories only comply with North American signage?
Really easy to read, and very visible. But yeah, the AI is not trained for it. "Dumb" cars seem to recognize them though
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/provencountermeasures/variable-s...
Here in Oslo it's due to the local air pollution caused by winter tires. Studded tires especially but non-studded as well as they have soft rubber which sheds particulates more easily.
Due to physics, cold air can act as a lid, preventing the ground-level air from getting refreshed, causing a build-up of particulates.
Lower speed means less particulates from the asphalt and rubber.
[1] https://www.engineering.com/story/now-revealed-why-teslas-ha...
It doesn't matter to the discussion. For whatever reason, if that is how the local laws work, it is what it is. If a car company wants to sell a car in that market, they need to comply or get out.
Finnish consumer ombudsman (and only the ombudsman) got the power to sue a class action suit in 2007. This power has been used exactly zero times.
It has nothing to do with “the boss”. It’s just basic bias of where the engineers are and where testing happens.
All of the other major players (waymo, cruise) suffer the same biases without a moody billionaire at the helm.
All the stories about Twitter/X suggest that absolutely everything revolves around what the boss wants on a given day.
That’s autocratic micromanagement, and its downside is that the boss ultimately has a limited attention span and employees learn how to distract him with shiny demos that show a glimpse of the impossible thing he demanded they ship.
A valid criticism would be that they shouldn’t operate out of the envs they are optimized for, but that has nothing to do with engineers pleasing the boss.
>Teslas will continue to be over hyped garbage.
Why do you suppose people keep buying them so much and seem to like them? Is it possible you just don’t like Elon Musk and are projecting that onto the car?
It's possible to dislike egotistical narcissists, and dislike their product at the same time. Psychobabble is a poor counter-argument.
The touch-panel that distracts from driver attention; the demonstrably defective auto-drive; the cold-weather poor performance are real things.
That's crazy; my 2018 Skoda (a cheap car, for anyone outside Europe) manages this, including temporary changes down to 40/50/60 on the motorway.
Yeah, but you're not seen as a hip modern well-off planetary savior, if you don't buy Elon's latest hype. How's the hyperloop going?
Musk, in 2015, viewed FSD as a solved problem just needing implementation: "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years."
Somewhere along the line, the problem got unsolved. In 2022, "Our focus now is just on solving this problem".
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-elon-musk-says-autonomou...
Navigate on Autopilot - Useless. Only handles highways, deactivates itself on normal roads. It can theoretically handle switching from one highway to another - in practice it attempts suicide every single time. If you don't intervene it will either crash, or cause a crash behind you.
Auto Lane Change - Nope, not "Auto" at all in Europe. Got to "consent" with your indicator lights and a gentle nudge on the steering wheel. Said nudge must apply a torque between 0.44 and 0.46 newton - anything less won't register, anything more will override the autopilot and leave you in manual control. Also it won't work if there's a car less than 200mt behind you in your target lane - it's ridiculously cautious. Finally, 30% of the time, despite above conditions being met, it hesitates for 30 seconds then opts to stay in its lane with a timeout error.
Autopark - nope, not since they removed the 3 EUR worth of ultrasonic sensors.
Summon - nope, see above.
Smart Summon - nope, again, see above
If there's anything like a class action in Germany I'll gladly join.
This is really a pity because I like the car apart from this scammy aspect.
https://jodavaho.io/posts/things-i-hate-about-my-tesla.html
New one to add: The front license plate falls off constantly. They dont require those in california, so when you buy one in states that do require it, they send you a janky plastic holder with just a bit of double sided tape that never seems to hold.
Funniest one: When you are using cruise control you cannot disable the wipers.
There is one company licensed to do front license plate stickers instead of plates though:
If you have an old beater, or the wrong skin color, you can get pulled over for not having a front plate.
You cannot disable the automatic wipers when using cruise control. This makes sense to me: Because they use the cameras for cruise control, they need to be able to clean the cameras whenever necessary. If the weather is clear, the automatic wipers never come on unless you hit a puddle or something.
So, this is something I never got. Like, even if you were convinced it was something which was definitely going to be delivered, on time, as promised, in a form that wouldn't cause the regulators to immediately ban it (and frankly this would be an unreasonable set of things to believe; even where the initial set of promises is reasonable, and they were not in this case, shit happens and things get delayed for reasons beyond anyone's control), why not just buy it when it became available? I don't get the impulse to pre-buy this sort of thing.
Not the OP, but the reason probably is “because it likely would be significantly more expensive at that time”.
Why there hasn't been a class action about it yet is a real mystery.
If I bought a Honda without ABS (let's pretend it was in the 90s) but paid a lot extra for a promise that they'll retrofit ABS later but never do, clearly that would be fraud.
I just don't get it. Any other little person does this and they would be big time side by investors and shareholders, and yet people want to trip all over each other talking about how awesome he is.
Reminds me of another cult of personality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith#T...
Reminds me of different cult of personality.
Also that would require lending your vehicle out to random strangers all the time, so you couldn't keep anything valuable/fragile in the car and you'd need to clean it rather frequently.
Even on the face of it, it's more like owning a taxi than a car that makes you money.
Anyone who gave it a second thought probably didn't take it seriously, but that didn't stop a whole bunch of fans and stock market analysts to sketch out some far flung implications.
This was the exact moment i woke up from musk's spell.
Why would corporation create a money printing machine and sold it for pennies out of the goodness of their hearts?
His bullshit is no longer working on me and empty claims are clear as day.
Now that he is lacking new revolutionary ideas his bullshit is harder to hide behind next great thing he is 'working' on.
There is a cult mentality and the cult members are happy with what they got, even if it's not exactly as advertised however it's not just about the cult mentality but it's about the overall experience of the product.
I think if Elizabeth Holmes delivered slick blood testing machines that work no different than those on the market(large amount if blood instead of a drop), but had better workflow and user experience, Theranos could have been a success like Tesla.
She tried to imitate Steve Jobs, had she imitated Elon Musk she would have been fine. She should have had the Siemens machines modified to work with modern GUI, developed some automation for drawing large quantities of blood in a pod at the mall and integrate all that with the healthcare and keep repeating that in 2 years just a drop of blood would ne enough.
The only difference between Musk and Holmes was that Musk actually delivered something that had some redeeming properties.
I wouldn't have said that Tesla just imitated existing car companies. Can you elaborate?
If Tesla's prime value proposal was to invent some tech that will do something revolutionary, they would have gone bust like Theranos. Instead, they built charging network and kick ass infotainments system that made their electric cars practical.
The Problem is that it didn't happen, because Elizabeth Holmes was a control-freak fraudster. She specifically siloed them to try and control information, which is the exact opposite of "put em in a room together".
Not sure what you mean. They are the ones that made the tech good enough for mainstream adoption. Your post reads like the “iPhone didn’t have any revolutionary tech” types.
What iPhone had was a revolutionary user interface that provided the outstanding user experience despite lacking a lot of features and functions.
I would argue that the addition of the app store is what made the iPhone really jump phones forward.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bu...
So, this is a common idea, but it doesn't _really_ gel with reality. The Tesla S, Nissan Leaf, VW's first electric car platform, and the Renault Z-E platform are contemporaries to within about a year (iirc it was Leaf, then an unsuccessful Z-E-based car, then eGolf in limited quantity, then S, then mass-market eGolf and Renault Zoe). Of these, the Leaf sold far more units than the S over its lifetime; the Zoe was about the same as the S, the eGolf somewhat less.
Tesla didn't have a _true_ mass-market car until the Model 3 some years later.
The litmus test is what cars you see on the roads of Wyoming. There are plenty of model 3s, and a leaf was an extremely rare site because the car was nearly useless outside of a city commute.
Given that US adoption of electric cars lagged other developed world countries, and thus early electric cars were generally designed for European, Chinese, and to some extent Japanese, market preferences, that seems like an extremely weird litmus test. Tesla _was_ the first company to release a mass-market car aimed at the _US_ market (or at least the first credible attempt; the Leaf was available in the US but was just too far from US market preferences), but the Chinese and European markets already had mass-market electric cars.
Which would be fine, if they weren't claiming robotaxis any day now.
had musk not purchased tesla after the roadster was built, all of his claims would have been utter bull. now that there was an entry electric car he could spin any tale or justify any hype by pointing to the one functioning model.
from there it was absolutely the modern car manufacturers game, promise a concept, deliver some part of it, talk about next quarter.
frankly having level 4 self driving pulled of by mercedes in california first should be the ultimate proof. merc did it in house faster without hyping it. wild
He invested before even the first prototype roadster was built. At no point did he “purchase” Tesla.
You could say this about Chrome, Apple's walled garden..and a bunch of things
Plus, he is super rich and people want to be close to big money - could lead to many benefits through networking and opportunities.
Until that happens the plates are still spinning and could go either way.
God, I wonder what kind of gotcha this was in your head.
He also exposed twitter's political bias & collusion with US security agencies, and exposed that the company can run with 80% less staff.
The Space Shuttle from the 80s was reusable too. Falcon 9 isn't fully reusable (upper stage) and now Starship drops some new ring into the sea.
> More or less nudged all other manufacturers to producing eletric cars at minimum
Didn't he instead let them delay making electric cars by transacting with them for their ZEV credits?
I think the SpaceX stuff is still impressive, but he didn't deliver on his big statements. Dragon was supposed to land on Mars years ago for instance. The Space Shuttle wasn't economical, but Starship went back to lots of elements of its design.
Excellent step if you want your competitors to be hopelessly behind.
It worked.
He reminds me of another self-centered, self-entitled, hypocritical lying sack of human debris.
Apparently, the laws magically don't apply to some folks.
Look, I don't have a Tesla, never owned one. I don't use Twitter. I think Musk has major flaws. There is definitely a growing trend of anti-Musk vs Musk fanboi flame wars. This thread seems to be no better.
If one side is demonstrably lying then it's disingenuous to make the two sides equally guilty.
It’s up to you as a consumer to either discredit the optimism or buy into it.
> There are no fundamental challenges remaining. There are many small problems. And then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together.
That is the fundamental problem, of all AI research. How many edge cases are there, and how many does it have to handle gracefully before it’s “good enough”? I think the tail is longer than people expect, and the changes that have to be made to address it are very fundamental.
At the same time, I really want them to succeed, and I think FSD could be one of the most transformative tech advancements of the century, like the original invention of the automobile.
Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. And you can't cheat yourself around it. We managed to cheat ourselves around growing complexity in subsystems by isolating them more and more, which allowed us to tackle the complexity with more people working in parallel. But that just further increases the integration complexity, where we don't know a way to effectively scale our approaches to deal with it.
The only way we know is "cutting corners": creating a system that's just working well in 99% of cases - leave the small problems of the remaining 1% unsolved, hence there's nothing to integrate for those. Works well enough for production use in a lot of situations. Doesn't work at all when it comes to Level 5 autonomous driving. And that's what Elon either doesn't understand or actively ignores.
100% This, which should be very obvious to anyone working at a FAANG tier company.
There are no shortage of ideas, technical documents, prototypes working locally. However to get a product to production that integrates (even in a paved path) is most often the most complex task.
No sir, he’s been making fraudulent claims about present capabilities not just future: convoy tech 10 times safer than humans, NOW.
I mean alternatively you can take the Waymo approach with loads of sensors and pre mapped routes but Musk seems to be banking on almost human level AI and we aren't there yet.
To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop.
That was in 2022, so 7 years after start of development/announcement.
I don't hold by breath.
Edit: link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI
That turns out to be a harder problem than most people think, and it gets in the way of the 'driving' part. "Are we looking at some big, blank object or are we looking at the sky? It's probably the sky, so we'll just drop it from the model." Which is how Teslas drive into big trucks. :/
Hell, my vacuum stops moving when it detects it crashed into something (likely torque required to move wheels is larger than expected).
Edit: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why it happened. The result is a crash in a super simple environment and is (to me) quite indicative to the state of things. They are supposed to come up with solutions, not excuses (also, Elon hates lidar, but that is still on Tesla).
[0] https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-...
Ha ha, that's a good take. Maybe you could help musk and point him to that vacuum :D
On a serious note self driving sounds like a near impossible problem due to deadly corner cases that take intuition of a general purpose AI.
Driving in California is probably the easiest level of complexity. How do you drive in inner EU town and cities?
I will believe when I see it. Otherwise any claims of 'we almost have it working' are lies to me
In the home, fewer objects are in motion near the vacuum. But maybe if you have a lot of cats...
I know for the fact that making a flying carpet is hard. Doesn't mean you should be greatful for life to be able to pay me $1M for a non-flying flying carpet that sets itself on fire.
I understand computer vision could be used as primary input, but IMO it should be mandatory to have some kind of proximity sensor as backup input.
Proximity sensor senses something, speed vector indicates collision in X seconds => stop
In particular, our vision is very very tied to our model of the world, and is clearly an evolutionarily derived trait, not something we learn from scratch as children. We are basically born with a model that can augment the raw sensory input with basic physics (object permanence, but also we have an intuition for things like "heavy = large momentum even at slow speeds", and for "what goes up will come down", some basic optics of how objects cast shadows, and others). In addition, we learn to recognize objects and we know their actual sizes from past experience, so we typically estimate distance this way far better than relying on parallax. "Small image of car" is automatically "car far away", even if seen with one eye, because we know what size a car is.
In fact, much of our brilliant vision starts going awry immediately in an artifical setting with misleading sized objects.
What you describe is largely the classical "cognitivist" model, which is more or less dead in the contemporary tought. We don't even have a very good account of depth estimation, apart from "bunch of things seem to affect it".
Note that many mammals have object permanence, and for some it develops right after birth. The fact that human development is so slow is the only reason some of these things look like actual learning. Another more clear example is our ability to walk/crawl - in humans it seems to be learned, but most other mammals are able to do it within minutes of being born, making it quite obvious it is in fact a genetically coded trait.
Being able to crawl within minutes (and even somewhat run within hours as horses do) is mostly due to anatomy and "reflex pathways". E.g. a cat can walk without brains [1], as can famosly headless chicken.
Human babies too have these kinds of reflexes but they are "abandoned" well before the baby learns to walk.
If you think quadruped walking is only a bunch of reflexes and human walking isn't, that still doesn't completely negate my point. Primate infants also display significantly more agility than human babies right afer birth, and "learn" to walk significantly faster.
Here [0] is a study for example that finds that the age of walking is 94% predictable for any mammalian species that walks on the ground by a particular ratio between the mass of the infant brain and the adult brain (that is, an infant animal essentially learns to walk when its brain reaches a certain percentage of its final brain size).
Besides this type of animal comparison, another signal we can use to distinguish between built-in capacities and things we learn from experience is to see whether a capacity can be developed later in life. For example, if you lack visual stimuli in the early part of brain development, even if you get it later, you will never develop vision (we know this from studies on kittens...).
The problems are both false-positive and false-negative and no matter what you do, you'll see some of both. (Yes, a problem people have, too.)
Oh, and don't forget cars are operating in an adversarial environment. Obstacles will appear w/out giving you time to stop.
He’s hell bent on machine vision which can’t even identify a cyclist for fucks sake! And somehow this is legal to deploy on public roads!
I think we can be pretty sure that almost all human drivers won't make that mistake and those who do should not be driving on their own just like Teslas software.
It's using smart summon, where a person, who can see the car because it's short range, uses their phone to move the car. They can stop it using their phone at any time by removing their finger from the touchscreen, yet weirdly didn't.
It's not autopilot, and it's not FSD, and it maxes out at 6 mph.
Also they've never updated the code for it, so it's not representative of the current tech in FSD
I thought Tesla's claim was that the radar was not necessary for FSD on roads. But it's necessary for driving around a parking lot?
From technical perspective, either they use same stack for environment awareness for summon and driving for shared capabilities and it failed or they do not, which is even worse. Either way, fail.
However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.
There just weren't really many other places for people who wanted to work on those cool problems to go to work. So Musk had the leverage to push them really hard.
But software? Not so much! Programmers can work pretty much anywhere. Even for a cool project like driverless cars there's quite a lot of companies trying to do it. And how many of the driverless car programmers specifically want to work on driverless cars? They'd probably be cool with other AI projects, of which there are a gazillion.
NASA, Boeing (or any defense contractor, really), Planet for satellite engineering, Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time. I contracted for some random small self-driving startup around 2010.
> Google/Waymo was doing self-driving around that time
I was talking about Tesla's electric car origins. When they started they were the only ones making electric cars that you'd actually want.
Personally my cynical perspective is I work with people that it could viably replace now and that's sad, not because it's good tech but the people are so fucking awful.
Some developers are complaining that we will be replaced, that somehow GPT4 can write good code. Similar artists, writers etc complain they will be replaced.
I can't see an AI in the next 20 years that you ask it "Build me GTA6" and it will create it for you, code, art, text, voices.
From my experience GPT is good for exploring, asking questions and getting sometimes inspiration from the answers, if the code you asked for what writen already by others and was trained on it then it will aproximate a good solution but it still does mistakes.
Current AI it is just interpollating some response based on what he saw in training, if the real answer is not close enough to points in training then you get garbage. Add on top bad training data and it generates most of the time sub optimal code. For example it always generates JavaScript code using old syntax and using old DOM APIs.
There is no logic with them, I asked an AI "is X legal in Javascript" and it answered No, it created an it created an answer that shows that was legal and working and rambled about why is not a good idea to use that. And I have many examples where the fcking long answers they give contradict themselves.
Sorry for the long comment, I daily see this devs complaining about this, earlier I read comments where some web devs were sure in three years they will have no job.
Btw illustrators are getting replaced. Not all of them of course, but the demand is shrinking. Similarly for certain writing roles.
Do we have any real data on this? Because it would make more sense that with the new tools you can be more productive as an artist and sell more. From the little I know about AI art is that at this moment it is still in need of a Photoshop user to do final touches, plus a few steps of in-painting and other AI manual steps.
I assume some super low quality output is created but I don't know of anyone who pays directly or via patreon on just a lazy single prompt AI generation(without other more involved work).
Speaking from personal experience, I know a guy whose firm has sharply reduced headcount in art/design and another guy whose firm used to hire illustrators but has since stopped because AI-generated illustrations (not central to their product) are considered good enough.
> with the new tools you can be more productive as an artist and sell more
I don't see a demand explosion outside of enthusiast circles (largely pr0n, to be honest). Sure you can make more, but you have no one to sell to, and unit price won't be the same when there's very cheap competition.
Anyway, we’re getting pretty offtopic.
[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...
But I agree, in the past in my village were only 2 people with photo cameras, when you needed a photo you would talk with them or go in the city, now we all have cameras but the real good photographs still have a job and the photo shops still have jobs for printing the photos people take with their cameras or even making photos from time to time.
Since GPT appeared our JIRA tickets did not changed, the AI does not have magic power to debug code andfix stuff, plan new features, optimize slow code, do customer support.
The phantom braking is the biggest deal: The car slams on the brakes in the middle of major highways in good weather just because it's a hot day and the camera saw a mirage and the car thinks it's about to drive off a cliff. This means the cruise control ("autopilot") on the car isn't even as reliable as "dumb" cruise control on a 20-year-old car, so I rarely use it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-...
It’s actually worse today than it was then.
It nudged you constantly, phantom brakes more, I’ve used it so much less and it sucks we can’t get refunds.
Also, automatic wipers straight up, stopped working. Do not come on when it’s raining hard anymore.
I understand all the complaints in the comments section about Elon over promising and wishing FSD were perfect by now, but I can't believe there aren't more positive comments too.
When I show my friends the FSD and acceleration of my Tesla, Santa mode, "emissions" mode, etc, they are always amazed, as am I. I'm living in the future and loving it.
Yes, when you show off something you spent a decent amount on and think is amazing and that you love, your friends will also indicate a positive reaction to it. Welcome to social dynamics 101.
A bunch of these claims are understandable with the tech and hype available at the time they were said, but there wasn't enough committent to follow-through. Not that it would have helped much.
> In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.
From Ludicrous, Edward Niedermeyer
* he's lying, i.e. he's knowingly deceiving his audience to create hype and raise the stock price which he financially benefits from
* he's bullshitting, i.e. he's embellishing what he knows is in development with the hopes that engineering will overdeliver and meet his promises or something similarly impressive to distract from the failed expectations
* he's truthful, i.e. he's genuinely and continuously overestimating what engineering can realistically deliver and keeps being wrong over the span of a decade
I'm not sure which scenario is most flattering. Keep in mind that a lot of his claims seem to be unplanned and he doesn't believe in PR departments so most of his statements seem to be his personal judgement based on what has been reported to him. I'm inclined to believe he doesn't care much about the truth value of his claims as long as they feel like the right thing to say to him ("hashtag no filter" as the kids used to say).
Outlier leaders are usually outliers in mindset.
I think he knows that when he lies, many people take him seriously because his companies are sometimes right. Which pumps his valuation.
I think he's a good generalist because he (like many autistics) finds it easy to drill into domains he finds interesting and keep up with discussions at a fairly advanced level but when you do that it's important to be aware that having binged expert sources on a subject for a month straight doesn't make you an expert in the field the same way a conversational crash course over a weekend doesn't make you a fluent speaker in a new language even if you know how to order a pizza and get a general idea of what people say to you.
I've actually experienced this misattribution of expertise myself: just because I've read several Wikipedia articles and binged some video essays on a given subject I've had people assume I'm an expert when I tell them about it - except I know that my "expertise" would collapse as soon as I were to talk to an actual expert. I think this is why a lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome: because they're literally faking it by having a good generalist knowledge without realising most people in the field also lack sophisticated underpinnings.
AFAIK, the Formula E safety car charges without a physical plug or someone getting out to do it (which is important for safety because it has to be able to leave its charging station quickly, without the extra delay of someone getting out to unplug it); it uses a wireless charging pad on the ground.
That would give a nice chart over time from which one could see the progress.
Is there anything online similar to this?
Another way to look at it would be to look at the revenue that is generated via FSD. Buyers probably do some due dilligence what FSD offers. If the number of buyers goes up, that could be an indicator that FSD is getting better. But a quick Google search did not bring up much data about this published by Tesla. In their earnings report, there is a chart showing the cumulative miles driven with FSD. Not sure if one can draw conclusions from that. It seems very smoothed out and only goes back to 2021.
If not, they might take harder and harder routes as FSD gets better. Making it look like there is less progress than there really is.
Just like you cannot trust benchmarks, Goodhart's law will kick in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes
Tesla keeps the true data secret and cherry pick the results they want. Would be inserting to data mine that data, like
- are there roads where humans always (most of the time ) take over
- how many near accidents are caused by FSD/autopilot
- are there time of day variations
- are there weather variations
- are there issues after software updates
- what are the good roads and bad roads see if we can identify what is special about them.
Probably there could be more the public would like to know if the data would be made public, and IMO makes no sense to keep this public safety data secret.
If he wants to kill Twitter, that's fine by me. I prefer a more decentralized internet anyway.
Anyway: FSD = Full Self Driving
Sometimes it's acronyms with 12 different possible meaning, where 4 of them could apply to the given context...
Like AC or IPC?
Your best chance today is to pack more sensores.
Edit: I still believe that the systems which assist the driver today are useful and can make driving safer and easier. I don't want to downplay what they have achieved but they are a looong way from L5.
The problem isn't just training, it's sensors. There are simply no sensors available today that work in all the different weather conditions that L5 requires with the required precision.
I think the Pure vision stuff is nifty, but “nifty” is the exact dead-last parameter when trying to transport my family safely from point A to point B.
Oh, it can't?
So you need cameras too?
So you have to build a 3-dimensional sensor fusion system for LIDAR to work?
Wouldn't that fusion system be more complex, less performant, and more fallible that just choosing a single model (vision/LIDAR) and optimising around that?
10 million years of animal evolution makes a good case for stereoscopic vision as a sensing system for navigating the world.
LIDAR is a crutch for low-maturity software systems.
Stereoscopic vision? That's when you apply sensor fusion to two cameras (and a number of microphones, too), isn't it?
If airplane designers had trusted in "animal evolution", planes would flap their wings to gain height.
Overall, the complexity of modeling the world the way an animal does seems much much bigger than a few different sensors.
Adding "a few different sensors" is not going to solve the fundamental problems of navigating the world.
If Tesla had been limiting its ideas to theoretical research, or even applied research, I'd be all for vision only as a valid research avenue. But they are putting this thing on the streets where I walk, and they are charging people thousands of dollars with claims that it works today, and that it will do wonders tomorrow. That is simply not acceptable for a green field research concept that probably has decades left in front of it.
No, the whole point about sensor fusion is that it can be greater than the sum of it's parts.
My whole point is that a single system is not sufficiently safe to do what we're trying to do. The point of FSD isn't just to navigate without hitting stuff. The point is to do it with ~99.999% accuracy, ~99.999% of the time while flying down the road at 80 MPH.
Humans are _terrible_ at this, just check the deaths due to automobile accidents each year. We have some pretty amazing stereoscopic vision. But I don't like trusting my safety to another human, and I sure won't trust it to a machine whose vision isn't as good as mine.
For me to trust a machine, it needs to be an order of magnitude better than myself.
It is actually shocking that anybody pushes the "good enough for evolution" narrative when Tesla has completely and utterly failed to do even that right. This is even ignoring all of the other purely mechanical inadequacies of cameras relative to eyes such as resolution, dynamic range, dynamic attention-based focal lengths, being mounted on mobile swivel to allow for parallax calculations, etc. Let alone the other neurological elements that are not fully understood of integral to human-level perception. But no, they could not even get the two eyes instead of one eye part right.
but yeah, broadside of a semi mistaken for the sky
Elon's objections to lidar are not because it's a bad idea but because of the costs. Especially because he's already sold cars with "full self driving" that don't have LiDAR. So he's painted himself in a corner.
Even if it can be done with vision only, lidar will add an extra data point for cases where the object recognition is in doubt. And the price will come down.
One should think of the car cameras as a fixed periscope view. Try driving with that, what the computer sees is more like driving a tank with monitors. Not the best.
It’s only reasonable to give the cars some super human senses to compensate, like LIDAR etc.
They held out longer than expected, some 20 years or so, but common sense prevailed. Even if they had to make a design where the buttons weren't clearly visible first.
Even today Macs don't really have 2 mouse buttons, they just call a double-finger click a "gesture" even though it is simply a right-click.
This can be true without both ever materializing though ;)
Part of the reason I've owned FSD since 2017 and yet spent exactly zero minutes in my car in the expressway, in light traffic, in good weather, in the middle of the day reading a book is because of the lack of an entry on the posted timeline saying something like: "Tesla states it will accept liability for any crashes that occur while FSD was engaged."
After all these years, it's fair to say: "In the 7 years that Tesla has accepted money from customers for FSD, Tesla still requires human supervision in all cases."
So far they have proven they are asmpytotically approaching something that drives badly and is in danger of hitting things.
Not using a "crazy number of sensors" is not something you can brag about outside a kind of "sell me this pen" sales pitch.
Tech is not biology, so in order for a computer to not do something stupid, it generally needs different sensors. Some sensors (depth gauge when scuba diving, altimeters for planes, or even gps) are obvious examples of when tech outperforms humans and is safety critical. Just because humans can drive doesn’t mean computers should replicate our “control loop”.
Our distance estimates are quite good at human scales, especially when compared to vision based approaches. We don't have great precision (we will never say something like "it's 19.7m away") but we very rarely grossly misestimate (think something is 10m away when it's actually 200m away or 10cm away).
Of course, compared to a LIDAR or advanced techniques used in physics, we don't hold the tiniest candles (say, if we were to compare to LIGO's distance measurements).
Waymo's remote support teams can reach into the driver's model of the world to fix things, for example maybe it mistook this stray traffic cone for actual roadworks - but they can't actually drive the car.
If Waymo needs a human to drive the car, they send a human to physically sit in it and drive the car. They have a whole bunch of people for that role. If you were in a Waymo that drove somewhere and there wasn't anybody in the driving seat, that's not because some 10 year old was using a PS4 controller to steer it from Bangalore, that's the Waymo driver software.
That seems like both an obvious and an easy to implement solution to me, what am I missing?
When the instructions are specific enough we could call it driving if you want, but it's not done with a steering wheel in real time.
The vehicle would have to be smart enough to execute all the tactical parts of driving anyway. Adding remote piloting just adds more failure cases and complexity.
Who says it can't?
FSD is a brand name, it’s not a term of the art.
But, yes, Waymo could reasonably be called “FSD”.
So it seems like they’re still all in on pure vision. I don’t think the xruck has lidar either, only hits I get talk about a lidar-equipped prototype in early 2023.
I'd be super interested to see if someone has successfully combined RGB data with LIDAR data.
This is basic university robotics. Sensor fusion ! There are a whole host of techniques for dynamically updating confidence between two or more sensors estimating the same values. Kalman filter being the standard approach (which for reference was used in the apollo missions 50 years ago - developed a lot since then)
And yes, it is commonly applied with vision models. There are a host of combined rgb/lidar, structured light, depth camera and more setups in the labs students are working on at my local university, and have been for at least 6 years
You can know more about sensor fusion than Elon does by reading a literal blog post.
The NN shouldn't have to "choose" one or the other. It's a classic "Not even wrong" question!
> Andrej Karparthy, Senior Director of AI, took the stage and explained that the world is built for visual recognition. Lidar systems, he said, have a hard time deciphering between a plastic bag and a rubber tire. Large scale neural network training and visual recognition are necessary for Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy, he said.
> “In that sense, lidar is really a shortcut,” Karparthy said. “It sidesteps the fundamental problems, the important problem of visual recognition, that is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch. It does give, like, really fast demos!”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former...
Ironically, just being able to leave your car in a parking space to charge when ready, then re-park, would be so useful.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fu...
There's also "this is quite deep" - it's usually not.
Problems like that are exactly the kind that lead to perpetual just around the corner predictions like this. We're almost there! We're almost there!
FSD is almost a solved problem under ordinary predictable driving conditions, but when you're driving there's a long tail of unusual circumstances that you run into that blow the limits of these models. Humans are able to improvise because we have a huge mental model of the world we inhabit and our location within it, which FSD systems do not. They're just reacting to stimuli.
Telsa went and made it even harder on themselves by abandoning LIDAR. One way to compensate for inferior intelligence is with superhuman senses, but they insisted that merely human-like senses like vision were "enough."
That's not necessarily wrong, but it makes it hard to talk about balancing engineering concerns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VWyaAzwMT0&ab_channel=AIDRI...
I have heard that the previous driving automation on a Tesla while not as advanced was generally solid for what it does and might be still a plus for those vehicles.
level 4 will probably take some time.
>FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021
Even though they hadn't achieved level 3 or 4? And still haven't two years later?
And from a consumer point of view, Tesla pilot is more capable than the one from mercedes. But legally you can take the hands and eyes of the road on the Mercedes.
There are many, many people out there who don’t drive or can’t drive for various reasons and FSD would enable them to be independent, get jobs, see friends and family. Not everyone lives in areas with decent public transport and with my parents, they live in a hilly area where walking to use public transport is at most very difficult and at worst impossible.
Another example, I know a fairly young man who had started having seizures in his 30s and was disqualified from having a driving license, FSD would change his life. What about all the people who didn’t get a driving license for one reason or another?
For me personally, while I can drive fine, I would much prefer to study or read or long car journeys and would love a car which is more like a moving living room, so I can sit and work at my laptop while the car takes me to my destination.
I assure you there is a massive, massive market for the first company that really cracks this problem.
It gets airplay because it’s easy to imagine all the cool things that would be possible if it were real. Like FLT. Musk said himself; Tesla is worth practically nothing without FSD. https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin.... Tesla is just another car company if these hopes and dreams aren’t true.
And we don't really know how liability will end up working when regulators start approving them (assuming that happens), but I would love it if it meant any potential issue or collision was never my fault or my problem - no concern that even though I didn't believe it was my fault I had to convince someone else, find a witness, deal with all that.
Just like taking a taxi, except it's there waiting for you whenever you're not using it. It's a chauffeured car for the masses, really. And that is evidently something that people do want.
Doing other stuff, like watching a movie, resting/sleeping or maybe even working.
Could be cool in an RV. Go to sleep, wake up in a different location without "waiting"
Or send your car to pick you up at the airport / train station.
Either the lawyers finally got him to stop spouting bullshit, or he got bored. Either way, I wonder if we'll have FSD before fusion energy arrives :^)
How many lies these worshiped holier than thou people can get away with, and people still listen to what they say?
And Musk is certainly not the only example. It's soon time for the presidential election again...
Entrepreneurial overconfidence and overoptimism: yes.
Fraud: no.
Tesla has been investing aggressively for nearly a decade to develop FSD.
Instead, for some unknown reason, because Musk says it, millions of people just believe it. People are wild.
Edit: and another thread just popped up on HN with this https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tesla-aut...
"Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention and will continuously improve All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot Autosteer on city streets Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control"
In which case it's not a BS promise but fraud.
Making claims about the future necessitates uncertainty. Would we rather only know about factuals? i.e. do not tell me about GPT-4 until the very fucking moment there is an API endpoint I can hit?
What are your data points? Is the lesson here, that we are good, as long as we make sure that bold claims are not easily falsifiable?
Again, I am not sure what we are looking for. If we are interested in punishing people for making bold claims about the future, do we understand that that necessarily means, that we okay with learning less about the future? It's a eat your cake and have it moment. I understand that we can meet somewhere in the middle, but as a rule of thumb. It obviously a trade-off. What do we want more of?
What did OpenAI sell/promise before the release?
All the more reason to distrust someone following up their claims with things like “I’m certain of that.” (February 2019)