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Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

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Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#41

Post by roenxi »

Larrikin wrote: post #17
gabesullice wrote: post #2

I find it difficult to take the technology review seriously with the off topic remarks and prefaces about Musk and Tesla at the beginning of the post.

If you aren't in the cult of personality, a lot of people need to justify it at this point. I have no interest in buying a Tesla unless he divests fully. Everyone else seems to be catching up without lying about their projected capabilities and I don't need an EV today. I don't want to give him any more money than he has.

How many CEOs & owners have you vetted when making purchases? CEOs are a pretty shady crew as a class of people; it attracts people who like power and they are the dangerous ones. Or people who are single-minded in their focus and they tend to come with a raft of unusual views and personalities. And even after vetting, you're probably just biasing your purchases in favour of CEOs who do image management rather than people you'd actually like to support.

If you're buying cars based inversely on how much money the company owner has, you're implicitly ruling out a lot of good options. It is using the language a bit loosely but in some relevant sense we'd expect people who make the most cost-effective products to make the most profit.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#42

Post by choeger »

What everyone seems to be ignoring when it comes to autonomous cars is that the last 1% or 0.1% or whatever remains unsolvable for "AI" might not really matter.

We can change roads, ffs! At the bare minimum, we could fence off difficult areas and force manual driving. Once many people own an autonomous car, there will be pressure to make roads safe and convenient for them.

Phantom braking for instance, is only a safety issue when the following car gets too close. Lanes can be annotated, etc.

The "AI" part is just marketing to get these cars on the road and set the customer's expectations. Once that is done, the hard parts will just be moved from the car manufacturer to the road builders.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#43

Post by mft_ »

html5cat wrote: post #16

My car is old enough to not have adaptive cruise control and lane centering, but that's all I'd love to have for now. Well executed, it's such a joy on a highway or in traffic. Jeep and others have it but drive like a bowling ball with guardrails up. Has anyone here successfully retrofitted Audi a4 with ACC? I hear Cruise started like that, would be awesome to get a kit like that.

Check out comma.ai - it may fit your car.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#44

Post by what-the-grump »

jlmorton wrote: post #22
forgot-im-old wrote: post #14

[flagged]

That's exactly what Elon has said. He's said that 99.99% of all vehicle miles are useless from a training perspective. https://www.teslarati.com/fsd-distance-driven-training-musk/

And yet on a very simple drive I have to intervene 4-6 times over a distance of 8 miles. How is this not useful? It would have been easier to ask people to record how to drive roads by now and use video game track logic where you race a ghost by now…

The only time fsd works ‘ok’, single lane roads with 90 degree stop signs / turns.

I don’t believe that the current hardware can handle what is needed to have passable FSD for an average consumer.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#45

Post by erulabs »

mg wrote: post #37

I think a good indicator if it is useful or not is to look at how much it is actually used. Tesla published a chart of cumulative miles driven over time on page 8 of their latest quarterly update: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... So far, I'm not sure what to make of it. The chart looks somewhat exponential. But since they brought more and more cars onto the road, one would expect expone…

Around then they rolled out a change that I hate, which was to remove cruise control and replace it with self-driving. Previously “one tap” was cruise, two was self-drive. Now it’s right into self-drive. I assume that increased hours significantly.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#46

Post by acchow »

georgeg23 wrote: post #25
jlmorton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Elon has said. He's said that 99.99% of all vehicle miles are useless from a training perspective. https://www.teslarati.com/fsd-distance-driven-training-musk/

So isn't that a deep problem to his FSD architecture?

No. For the easy 99.999% of driving they keep very little of the training data.

Basically you want to minimize manual interventions (aka disengagements). When the driver intervenes, they keep a few seconds before (30 seconds?) and after that intervention and add that to the training data.

So their training data is basically just the exceptional cases.

They need to just make sure they don’t overfit so that the learned model actually does have some “understanding” of why decisions are made and can generalize.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#47

Post by tsimionescu »

nelsonic wrote: post #13

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…

"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.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#48

Post by ThereIsNoWorry »

Almost a decade ago I used to be a hyped up HS graduate fully spoon-fed the AI hype bubble (after 2012, the first "deep" learning breakthroughs for image classification started hyping the game up). I studied at a top 5 university for CS and specialised in deep learning. Three years ago I finished, rejected a (some would call "prestigious") PhD offer and was thoroughly let down by how "stupid" AI is.

For the last 2-ish years, companies found a way to throw supercomputers on a preprocessed internet dictionary dataset and the media gulped it up like nothing, because on the surface it looks shiny and fancy, but when you peek it open, it's utterly stupid and flawed, with very limited uses for actual products.

Anything that requires any amount of precision, accountability, reproducibility?

Yeah, good luck trusting a system that inherently just learns statistics out of data and will thus fundamentally always have an unacceptable margin of error. Imagine using a function that gives you several different answers for the same input, in analytical applications that need a single correct answer. I don't know anyone in SWE that uses AI for more than as a glorified autocomplete which needs to be proof-read and corrected more often than not to the point of oftentimes being contraproductive.

Tldr; it is exactly zero surprising that FSD doesn't work, and it will not work with the current underlying basis (deep learning). The irony is, that people with power to allocate billions of dollars have no technical understanding and just trust the obviously fake marketing slides. Right, Devin?

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#49

Post by masklinn »

html5cat wrote: post #16

My car is old enough to not have adaptive cruise control and lane centering, but that's all I'd love to have for now. Well executed, it's such a joy on a highway or in traffic. Jeep and others have it but drive like a bowling ball with guardrails up. Has anyone here successfully retrofitted Audi a4 with ACC? I hear Cruise started like that, would be awesome to get a kit like that.

Honestly stop and go is where I most want ACC / follow mode.

Regular cruise works fine on highways, and my experience with adaptive is that it makes passing more difficult as it slowed down way too early (though other implementations might be better), plus the focus of smooth / comfortable slowdowns means it can be hard to realise if you’re watching the road and your surroundings, at which point you’re quite a ways below speed for the passing lane and need to accelerate back up.

Also doesn’t deal well with passing trucks for lack of anticipation.

Re: Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo

#50

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sneak wrote: post #11

> I’ve had a Model Y for more than 3 years now, well before Elon revealed himself as the kind of person he really is, and I’ve been happy with it. > When I buy my next car, my requirements will be simple: I want an EV, an extensive charger network along I-80, and an autosteer that’s at least as good as what I have today. Let’s hope there’ll be decent Tesla alternatives by then. Gee, I wonder if this is going to be an…

Conversely, I'd worry about the impartiality of any Tesla review that didn't prominently disclaim that yes, they are aware Musk is acting like a loon recently.
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