It is difficult to convey this simple fact: Tesla’s lead in autonomy is vast.
The company has assembled the talent and expertise— the best AI team— required to develop a technique that genuinely solves the autonomy problem.
While many interpret Ashok’s article as a recipe for replication, it is nothing of the kind. The essential ingredient, the internal architecture of the model itself, is missing.
Another critical advantage lies in Tesla’s Niagara Falls of real-world data. The company’s real-world simulator is remarkable, but simulation alone can be copied. What cannot be easily replicated is Tesla’s ability to feed authentic driving scenarios into that simulator. Without massive scenario data, generating (or templating) rare and unusual real-world edge cases becomes exponentially harder than most realize.
Finally, Tesla’s solution is defined by scale: every Tesla vehicle is a capable robot, by vision alone. (The LiDAR debate is long over.)