Obvious things first, cameras have way worse contrast and low light sensitivity than human eyes.
Humans have much more evolved logical thinking capacity, even the stupid ones can figure stuff out that modern AI struggles with.
Humans have other sensors, too that they use to plausibility check the picture they see. I.e. one of the best sensor fusion systems on the planet.
When in doubt humans can figure out whether it's a lens occlusion or a some other artifact in their vision by virtue of moving their head around.
There's probably other things I'm not thinking of. In any case to make full self driving work we should first start by using all available tech to make it safe. When you have safe tech you can slowly start removing individual sensors while verifying that safety remains high. As the experience and system evolves there will be optimization potential.
And until we have that low light thing and high contrast figured out, camera alone doesn't cut it.
I personally feel like that isn't really true any more.
But try asking your favorite LLM what happens if you're holding a pen with two hands (one at each end) and let go of one end.
Seems fine to me?
https://chatgpt.com/share/69bcd01a-a750-800d-95f5-3b840b9ee2...
https://gemini.google.com/share/edc223bb6291 (the try again gave a woman, oops)
Even Midjourney couldn't do it.
Researchers built the Winnograd Schema Challenge more than a decade ago to assess common sense reasoning, and LLMs beat that challenge task around GPT 4.
If you ask them in isolation they may write a script to solve it "properly", but I guess this is because they added enough of these to the training set. But this workaround doesn't scale.
As soon as I give the LLM a proper problem and a small part of it requires numeric reasoning, it almost always hallucinates something and doesn't solve it with a script.
If the logic/math is part of a larger problem the miss rate is near 100%.
LLMs have massive amounts of knowledge, encoded in verbal intelligence, but their logic intelligence is well below even average human intelligence.
If you look at how they work (tokenization and embeddings) it's clear that transformers will not solve the issue. The escape hatches only work very unreliably.
I have been broadly quite happy with gpt 5.4 xhigh's reasoning on things like performance engineering tasks.
They're just not that good - nowhere near human vision performance. And a human in a car has a surprisingly good view of the road and a very fast pan tilt system to look around.
Tesla's do not actually have 360 degree full binocular vision coverage - nor the ability for a camera to lean left or right to improve an ambiguous sensor picture.
So while I fully believe that vision only self driving could work, within the constraints of automobile platforms and particularly the Tesla and it's current camera deployments, it is not remotely similar enough to human visual fidelity for that to solve a valid argument.
Humans are hard to compete with! I'd want LIDAR & RADAR just to give me an edge.
Tesla’s actually have zero binocular vision coverage because the cameras have different focal lengths and are too close even if they did have the same focal lengths.
They are also below minimum vision requirements for driving in many states.
I also own a Tesla, and there is no indication shown to the user that FSD's vision is degraded. They need to add this in.
For example, numerous times I have been driving my Tesla with FSD activated with ostensibly a clean and clear windshield when suddenly the car will do the "clean the windshield in front of the camera routine" without any indication that the car's camera is degraded. If people haven't seen this "clean the windshield routine", the wiper fluid is dispensed and the wiper will vigorously wipe in front of the camera only -- the rest of the windshield only gets a cursory wipe.
This indicates to me that the camera has poor visibility and I am not informed or aware of this as a driver, which is concerning. I am often curious if there is a thin occluding film on the windshield in the camera box in front of the camera, or something that has degraded FSD's vision, but they do not give you the ability to view the camera feed, nor do they notify you that the vision is degraded. I think a "thin occluding film" may be in the camera box because my normal windshield outside of the camera box started to show a thin chemical film after a couple of months, which apparently (according to a Google search) happens when a new car off-gasses, adding a thin film of chemical byproduct to the windshield. This is my first new car so I've no idea if this is normal or not.
As with all things FSD, it does sometimes and not others. I've driving my parents' Tesla with FSD engaged and it did complain when the windshield got dirty but didn't say anything when it drove into fog. (I took over manually.)
That argument is dumber and dumber any time I think about it. And we haven't even gotten into the fact that human eyes and its partner in crime the brain work much different than a camera.
But yes I agree we should hold self driving cars to a higher standard.
Systems built from cameras that are only nearly as capable as human eyes and software that is only nearly as capable as the human brain will fall short overall. To match or surpass human performance, the individual components need to exceed human abilities where possible--and that's where LiDAR provides an advantage.
If the cameras are a little less sharp in some sense is a minor rounding error in comparision.
Comparing human and camera acuity is difficult. But saying Teslas have cameras that are a little less capable than human eyes is unfounded.
You can say that about the original IBM PC from 1981. That doesn't make the IBM PC better at driving.
"Number of miles driven in situations where [quality of conditions is greater than some threshold] versus all conditions."
"If you don't count the games we'd definitely have lost, our winning percentage is so much higher!"
That's not good enough. Too many accidents at manual takeover. The new standard, which Mercedes has demonstrated and China is mandating, is that the system must be able to pull the vehicle over and stop safely when there are problems.
In any case, it seems reasonable to me that the human should be making the decisions once conditions become adverse. It’s a simple liability issue for the car company but also I’d rather trust my own judgment if it’s only 80% certain it’s not driving me off a cliff.
That seems to be better than that try to continue to run the vehicle. What would you expect it to do?
If it is foggy I just don't drive, anybody that expects me to drive when conditions are bad can go and drive themselves.
If the condition is a little fog and little rain and little snow/sleet I hate to break it to you but those are very permitting. In most of the continental US the number of days where driving conditions for an (below)average human and such that it is wiser not to get on the road is very small. If the "robo"taxi technology you posses cannot match that of a (below)average human you got nothing but vaporware you've been pitching as "done deal" for more than a decade.
:-)
And this is an amazingly stupid statement. Humans drive with most of their senses, not just vision. In fact our proprioception plays an important role in driving.
Even Tesla's use of cameras is poor because they're monocular and fixed in place. Most humans have binocular vision and those visual sensors have multiple degrees of freedom and the ability to adjust focus.
Even if you wanted to only use vision for navigation it's irresponsible to not use binocular configurations that get more reliable depth sensing.
That's enough for vastly more depth perception than any human eyes.
I have 20 toes. Therefore I should fly 10 times better.
Amazing how you lost your critical sense just because you want Tesla to succeed and drink everything Musk says.
At this point I truly don't understand why anyone cares what that liar says.
It might be dishonest (if he doesn't believe it is possible), but I don't think he's saying that the current systems have reached the mark.
This must be one of the most stupid takes that gets repeated non stop by Tesla fans.
I just don't get it. Humans also have emotions and other biological senses that Computers don't have. You just cannot compare both. What makes human so good at driving is that they can react relatively well to unknown new events. Teslas cannot do that, and with the current hardware never will.
And yet randos on the web keep asserting he's not an engineer. Is there any factual basis for this? Is it just that he doesn't have a degree with that word in the title?
I suppose most people don't know that physics degrees are largely accepted as engineering degrees.
He continually says dumb things that aren't true or reasonable and has never worked in the field he's a rich boy who bought things with daddy's aparteid money.