There's Something Huge About Tesla's AI Driving Data Which Nobody I...

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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.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1695247110030119054
- elonmusk

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.

Elon's screen driving

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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