With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly.
Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor.
And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system.
If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.
As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is very much a “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” kind of technology. People can promise anything about AI, because when it works it feels like magic. But it’s not magic, and we can’t expect every goal to be met just because someone is using AI. Nobody knows what challenges lie ahead for an end to end self driving system precisely because no one has done it. And it should be noted that with their “hydra net” architecture it is relatively end to end but it is not a single large network, but an engineered assortment of many small networks. Quite a lot of human choice goes in to decisions around how to design that, and this also leads to edge cases. But even more general systems like GPT-4 suffer from issues with edge cases.
We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. Human eyes and the human brain are so much more advanced than a computer and cameras, it may not follow that “images are all you need”.
Very interesting question. Certainly I’ve never heard them discuss this in any of the AI system lectures. It’s always stated as “we know humans can drive using only our eyes so we have an existence proof”.
Plus, a human could drive in a variety of conditions but there’s just so many possible scenarios the car could encounter, and humans crash too, so the real question is what is the relative performance between a human and the machine across thousands of potential or actual crashes. Kinda hard to measure.
Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor.
And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system.
If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.