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The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works ... Saying that it will "never" work is myopic. Never bet against M

The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works ... Saying that it will "never" work is myopic. Never bet against Moores Law or Elon! As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don't have FSD yet) I cannot wait to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a "copilot" do some of the "thinking" & driving for me. Yes, there are still some instances of FSD Supervised doing strange things in the YouTube videos people are posting, but it's definitely no longer a "demo"! It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ... Now as a TSLA shareholder, I'm still sceptical that the RoboTaxi/CyberCab system will be 100% foolproof ... But if they can prove through data that it's safer than 99.9% of human drivers on every day journeys and thus get regulatory approval it will be game changing! If Tesla can do 90% of short ride city driving at a fraction of the cost of Uber/Lyft they have a real cash cow on the horizon!

therouwboat 2y ago
"With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control. Forget about just being focused, you need to be hyper-focused" Driving with FSD on seems to be more stressful than just driving.
- what-the-grump 2y ago
  Driving with FSD in mid to moderate traffic is more stressful. Usually drop fsd to AP. Driving with FSD on empty roads is very enjoyable and whenever it decides to do something you can recover/correct with no stress. Driving in poor conditions with FSD feels safer, it sees better than me in the dark and rain for sure. Driving with fsd in heavy traffic about the same as driving a car yourself, this where I usually drop back to AP. Is driving my tesla easier or harder than another vehicle? It’s much much easier than driving my ICE suv. But from a pure FSD perspective, if the car didn’t have AP I believe my opinion would not be the same.
KaiserPro 2y ago
> Saying that it will "never" work is myopic. The implication is that Tesla can't make it work. In the same way that Meta are unlikley to make AR glasses a "thing". > As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don't have FSD yet) I cannot wait to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a "copilot" do some of the "thinking" & driving for me. depending on which country you are in, you'll be on the hook for any mistakes. > It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ... This is the fallacy of statistics. Its probably better/similar performance than humans in 80% of cases. The problem is, it performs significantly worse when it fails. It does not fail safe. Thats the really hard part. I also question the wisdom of using unverified recordings of average drivers to train on. Unless you know how go they are, you're going to be feeding really bad behaviours into the model.
- nelsonic 2y ago
  If people are already using FSD (supervised) on a daily basis, it's working. It's not "Level 5" yet, but they don't claim it is. Totally agree that the "Full Self Driving" name is marketing BS. What should they call it instead? "Kinda Works Autonomous Driving, Please Pay Attention" ... ;-)
boudin 2y ago
I really hope this will not been available in a long time in Europe. I don't want to be part of musk's irresponsible beta testing plan as someone who lives around tesla cars. I also really hope that there will be a point based drivers licence similar to human ones that applies to those technologies before this kind of experiment is started. If it loses its points, the whole system has to be disabled and having to go through a audit/licence process to be allowed on public roads again.
tsimionescu 2y ago
"It's only a matter of time" means nothing. It was only a matter of time in Cesar's age before we got supercomputers and planes. Tesla is near the bottom of the pack on self-driving tech, with no real hopes of going beyond the level 2 self-driving of FSD, which is objectively worse than just driving yourself. There are already multiple companies with either actual self-driving fleets (e.g. Waymo) or limited use cases of full autonomy with company liability (Mercedes), and many others with working prototypes for one or the other, or even beyond. Tesla is living in their marketing bubble of "FSD robotaxis next year now", where they have been living since 2018 or earlier, while the rest of the pack barely even sees them in the rear view mirror.
- make_it_sure 2y ago
  you're so wrong. do more research. Driving on a geo-fenced area is much much simple than what Tesla is trying. Eventually they can do that as well without problems if they can't generalise.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    You do realise that waymo doesn't have drivers in their cars anymore? How about you do research on Tesla's competitors? Having a driver intervene is several orders of magnitude less advanced. Easily more than a decade away from the goal of self driving. You can build a geofenced area that spans every single road in the USA so the fact that something is geofenced tells you absolutely nothing.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Sure, but "we're trying something harder" doesn't mean anything. Waymo is succeeding at a well defined, useful form of driverless tech. They will probably be able to extend this, maybe slowly, to more and more cities. Tesla is failing at everything they're promising, and not delivering anything useful along the way (FSD as it exists today is more dangerous and more demanding than regular driving).
    - maxlin 2y ago
hankman86 2y ago
I wonder if the rules of continuous improvement apply to ML models. It seems that regressions are very easy to pick up. And that with a complex task like FSD it is virtually impossible to use the established tools to safeguard the stack from regressions (i.e. test cases that assert some unbroken functionality).
ThereIsNoWorry 2y ago
> It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ... I heard that argument for many years for many deep learning applications of significant value. Any day now, right?
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
> The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works And I don't think that you understand it either. In the real world, all exponentials are just the early part of an s-curve. Everything has limits, reaches diminishing returns and tops out. If a technique is already topping out, there won't be great leaps in performance without fundamental changes. An incremental "update" won't do it at that point in the curve. You can pick examples from several hyped technologies today that are going to work properly and change the world "real soon now".
arp242 2y ago
> In December 2015, Musk predicted that "complete autonomy" would be implemented by 2018. At the end of 2016, Tesla expected to demonstrate full autonomy by the end of 2017, and in April 2017, Musk predicted that in around two years, drivers would be able to sleep in their vehicle while it drives itself. In 2018 Tesla revised the date to demonstrate full autonomy to be by the end of 2019. And this goes on for a bit longer up to the present day. After close to a decade of failed promise again and again and again I think we can safely dismiss the "perhaps a bit too optimistic" good-faith defence. But hey, maybe this time it's just around the corner, cross my heart hope to die. And maybe the rapture will be upon us next year like that guy is preaching on the street corner (for real this time – last chance to repent sinners!)
kalleboo 2y ago
I remember using Text OCR and Voice recognition in the 90's. It was like 90% there, it seemed like we were just a few years away from it working perfectly. Almost 30 years later, OCR and voice recognition, now backed by machine learning, is far more impressive than it was back then, but it still keeps making mistakes that I have to fix. And those are far, far easier problems than driving.

therouwboat 2y ago

"With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control. Forget about just being focused, you need to be hyper-focused" Driving with FSD on seems to be more stressful than just driving.

what-the-grump 2y ago
Driving with FSD in mid to moderate traffic is more stressful. Usually drop fsd to AP. Driving with FSD on empty roads is very enjoyable and whenever it decides to do something you can recover/correct with no stress. Driving in poor conditions with FSD feels safer, it sees better than me in the dark and rain for sure. Driving with fsd in heavy traffic about the same as driving a car yourself, this where I usually drop back to AP. Is driving my tesla easier or harder than another vehicle? It’s much much easier than driving my ICE suv. But from a pure FSD perspective, if the car didn’t have AP I believe my opinion would not be the same.

KaiserPro 2y ago

> Saying that it will "never" work is myopic. The implication is that Tesla can't make it work. In the same way that Meta are unlikley to make AR glasses a "thing". > As a Tesla M3 owner (in Europe where we don't have FSD yet) I cannot wait to have it for long road trips on highways where I want to relax and have a "copilot" do some of the "thinking" & driving for me. depending on which country you are in, you'll be on the hook for any mistakes. > It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ... This is the fallacy of statistics. Its probably better/similar performance than humans in 80% of cases. The problem is, it performs significantly worse when it fails. It does not fail safe. Thats the really hard part. I also question the wisdom of using unverified recordings of average drivers to train on. Unless you know how go they are, you're going to be feeding really bad behaviours into the model.

nelsonic 2y ago
If people are already using FSD (supervised) on a daily basis, it's working. It's not "Level 5" yet, but they don't claim it is. Totally agree that the "Full Self Driving" name is marketing BS. What should they call it instead? "Kinda Works Autonomous Driving, Please Pay Attention" ... ;-)

boudin 2y ago

I really hope this will not been available in a long time in Europe. I don't want to be part of musk's irresponsible beta testing plan as someone who lives around tesla cars. I also really hope that there will be a point based drivers licence similar to human ones that applies to those technologies before this kind of experiment is started. If it loses its points, the whole system has to be disabled and having to go through a audit/licence process to be allowed on public roads again.

tsimionescu 2y ago

"It's only a matter of time" means nothing. It was only a matter of time in Cesar's age before we got supercomputers and planes. Tesla is near the bottom of the pack on self-driving tech, with no real hopes of going beyond the level 2 self-driving of FSD, which is objectively worse than just driving yourself. There are already multiple companies with either actual self-driving fleets (e.g. Waymo) or limited use cases of full autonomy with company liability (Mercedes), and many others with working prototypes for one or the other, or even beyond. Tesla is living in their marketing bubble of "FSD robotaxis next year now", where they have been living since 2018 or earlier, while the rest of the pack barely even sees them in the rear view mirror.

make_it_sure 2y ago
you're so wrong. do more research. Driving on a geo-fenced area is much much simple than what Tesla is trying. Eventually they can do that as well without problems if they can't generalise.
- imtringued 2y ago
  You do realise that waymo doesn't have drivers in their cars anymore? How about you do research on Tesla's competitors? Having a driver intervene is several orders of magnitude less advanced. Easily more than a decade away from the goal of self driving. You can build a geofenced area that spans every single road in the USA so the fact that something is geofenced tells you absolutely nothing.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Sure, but "we're trying something harder" doesn't mean anything. Waymo is succeeding at a well defined, useful form of driverless tech. They will probably be able to extend this, maybe slowly, to more and more cities. Tesla is failing at everything they're promising, and not delivering anything useful along the way (FSD as it exists today is more dangerous and more demanding than regular driving).
  - maxlin 2y ago

hankman86 2y ago

I wonder if the rules of continuous improvement apply to ML models. It seems that regressions are very easy to pick up. And that with a complex task like FSD it is virtually impossible to use the established tools to safeguard the stack from regressions (i.e. test cases that assert some unbroken functionality).

ThereIsNoWorry 2y ago

> It's real and it's only a matter of time before it's better than humans in most circumstances ... I heard that argument for many years for many deep learning applications of significant value. Any day now, right?

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

> The author of this article doesn't understand how continuous improvement in software works And I don't think that you understand it either. In the real world, all exponentials are just the early part of an s-curve. Everything has limits, reaches diminishing returns and tops out. If a technique is already topping out, there won't be great leaps in performance without fundamental changes. An incremental "update" won't do it at that point in the curve. You can pick examples from several hyped technologies today that are going to work properly and change the world "real soon now".

arp242 2y ago

> In December 2015, Musk predicted that "complete autonomy" would be implemented by 2018. At the end of 2016, Tesla expected to demonstrate full autonomy by the end of 2017, and in April 2017, Musk predicted that in around two years, drivers would be able to sleep in their vehicle while it drives itself. In 2018 Tesla revised the date to demonstrate full autonomy to be by the end of 2019. And this goes on for a bit longer up to the present day. After close to a decade of failed promise again and again and again I think we can safely dismiss the "perhaps a bit too optimistic" good-faith defence. But hey, maybe this time it's just around the corner, cross my heart hope to die. And maybe the rapture will be upon us next year like that guy is preaching on the street corner (for real this time – last chance to repent sinners!)

kalleboo 2y ago

I remember using Text OCR and Voice recognition in the 90's. It was like 90% there, it seemed like we were just a few years away from it working perfectly. Almost 30 years later, OCR and voice recognition, now backed by machine learning, is far more impressive than it was back then, but it still keeps making mistakes that I have to fix. And those are far, far easier problems than driving.