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Everybody is missing something
Last night Elon Musk shared a 45 minute drive around Palo Alto in his Tesla Model S Plaid. Only he didn't drive, the car drove.
I've watched dozens of videos from Tesla's "Full Self Driving" or FSD Betas for months now. This one was different. It looked similar to the ones I've seen but under the hood, Elon explained something amazing.
Instead of being a computer program written line by line to recognize roads, signs, other cars, pedestrians, kids, dogs etc, this one was not running a conventional computer program.
FSD version 12 has been trained with data from millions of hours of driving by real people on real roads. Instead of being told "this is what a speed bump looks like", this mountain of data was fed into a gigantic neural net.
After an astonishing amount of processing which has to occur once on Tesla's static computers, that gives Tesla's cars a relatively simple way to convert what it sees 30 times per second into the amount it needs to turn the steering wheel, accelerate or brake (and hit the turn signals etc).
The car is not particularly smart, and it doesn't need an internet connection
This is another key point which Elon spoke about: obviously you can't rely on a connection to the internet. Instead you do all the data crunching in advance and give the car rules and ways to interpret what it sees. It can be updated every few weeks, but it doesn't need to talk to the internet every second.
Elon did point out that a key part of the process is deciding what constitutes good, safe driving and what doesn't. There's a huge human element that goes into choosing with which videos to train the system on and which ones to show it as examples of what it must not do.
He pointed out that coming to a full stop at a stop sign is something which regulators have insisted they do but their real world data shows a very small number of real drivers actually do! The FSD Tesla's will comply with this rule more often than people.
Not Just USA
Elon made the point that once you have a driver's license in most of the world, you can fly off to another country, even one which drives on the wrong side of the road, and rent a car!
Elon's new Tesla system is probably the only one with even a remote chance of quickly expanding deployment on unfamiliar roads. A few months of learning from good drivers in a new location coupled with a modest expenditure in centralized equipment and time, and he'll be able to tell any existing Telsa how to drive itself anywhere in the world. Except Rome, obviously, Italian drivers in Rome are just insane.
Tesla's training set for FSD 12 is not just the video which everyone is talking about
This is the big point: it's not just the video!
Tesla's training set is also the precise position of all user inputs, steering wheel, pedals and ever setting in the car's systems. It is the cabin and outside temps, it's whether the windscreen wipers are working and how fast they're working. And much more.
Then you have accelerometers in all directions, suspension loads at each corner, speed of all the wheels and traction levels and more.
And all of that is SYNCHRONIZED with the cameras. Nobody has anything like the data set Tesla already has, and their data set grows exponentially as each new Tesla car gets delivered and goes driving!
Elon's Tesla is so far ahead of the rest it's almost scary.
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I'd have thought that all such systems will use a combination of machine learning and programmed logic. They have to deal with novel situations, but also know what stop and speed signs mean. I was driving a Corolla hire car this week that was reading the speed signs, but it had no self drive.
Musk is known to have been misleading about what his cars can do in previous demonstrations. I'm avoiding his platform anyway.
Reading the speed signs is a feature of MobilEye which was an Israeli startup bought by Intel. It also does lane assistance. It's barely a pocket calculator to the super computer capabilities in Tesla cars. I've had it in my car for 6 years, it's never been updated. It sometimes has trouble with the yellow lines we now have marking special lanes for buses.
The end result of whether it is heuristic code or neural net is the same, what he's showing off now, however, drastically improves how fast the system can improve or move into new areas.
Musk and Tesla have always had bad press because they don't play the usual games with the media and pay for advertising. I won't be betting against him on anything.
I think he has smart people working for him, but he makes some questionable decisions. That may catch up with him
A bunch of sub mediocre media people are trying to tell you what to think about him.
When they've achieved something comparable to building the team which launched more stuff into orbit this year than the rest of the world combined it might be time to pay attention to them.
His only significant mistake in my eyes was over paying for Twitter, but buying it was genius. This makes him terrifying to many established figures.
Sounds as if Tesla will finally make it, the FSD they are talking about since years. And as the first one. That’s good news for every Tesla investor and the users as well.
…Except for Rome, though. 😜
He is complaining about his own built car :o
He's making it better.
Musk is way ahead of everyone on everything.
Elon has a way of promoting and hyping himself of stuffs he uses without letting others know the disadvantage of what his stuffs can do. Tesla is a nice product but I still don't see this as being special with the era we are now where most things are advancing.
It's a fair point. His various corporate tentacles may place him ahead of the curve in some technical matters, but others are building and working always as well. All things must pass, even golden genius-boy Elon...
I don't care about this media/internet personality (stranger) who would in all likelihood be personally insolvent or totally unknown were it not for the substantial government subsidies his businesses have and continue to receive.
Yet as it stands he hoards more resources than the majority of the rest of the people on Earth put together could ever possibly need.
But hey I stopped and read so yeah whatchagunnado, have a nice night
Their products are very special, but there is a hoard of bad press because they don't pay to advertise.
Wow this is awesome. So if the car is not relying on the Internet - that makes it harder to get hacked?
We are living in fascinating times! Thank you for sharing this with us!
How do you hack something that you do not have direct access to?
What about when it updates? Just as vulnerable as anything then
Sure, but if it continues to run locally from trusted distributions, it should be fine.
You can also check to see if you have a verified distribution with a hash.
I am not an IT guy. But if something gets directions from a server and you hack the server, shouldn’t you be able to control it? Aren’t those 5G controlled buses in china controlled via a server?
Like I said not an IT guy.
It's like the directions are downloaded like a program. If you never update or only update from trusted distributions you should be fine. But I don't completely know how it's setup.
Hacking is a small part of it, if the car needs to ask a server in California whether it should go or stop at a traffic light, you're going to crash a lot.
This is amazing the post sir. @brianoflondon
Seems like musk is really controlling all the world recently now
I can see the doings of Elon Musk
Nice one!
I think should my bank account allow it, one day I'll probably buy a Tesla. I'd like a better truck. Fingers crossed.
Cool. I'd much rather have a car that I own and can repair myself.
there is much more needed to be added in tesla machine learning.
#hive #posh