Elon Musk talked about a lot of stuff in his recent interview with TED's Chris Anderson, but one of the bigger things he revealed about Tesla was the fact that its FSD beta software was now being piloted by 100,000 people. He had earlier revealed in January that there were 60,000 users which mark a massive jump of almost 2x in just 3 months. Musk reiterated that Tesla was on track to solving the issue of full self-driving by the end of the year thanks to the amount of training data it was gathering via real word usage.
Tesla started rolling out its FSD beta last year but it was riddled with issues. FSD is Tesla's successor to AutoPilot which has been largely classified as a level 2 ADAS system but Tesla has marketed it in a rather hyperbolic way which has led to many road accidents. Anderson asked Musk if by the end of the 2022 FSD would be safer than a human driving the car, the world's richest man replied, " Yes, I mean, the car currently drives me around Austin most of the time with no interventions. And we have over 100,000 people in our full self-driving beta program."
Musk also shared more insight into how the development of FSD had caused technical problems. He revealed whenever Tesla felt it had solved an issue another issue would crop up. "It goes up - you know - sort of fairly straight away. And then it starts tailing off, and you start getting diminishing returns," he added.
His comments are on track with what Apple's CEO Tim Cook has said about full self-driving. He has called it the mother of all AI problems. Apple is also working on a full self-driving car and that project has been in the doldrums for 7-8 years and is now led by its head of AI, John Giannandrea.
Tesla for its part has taken a rather unconventional route toward solving the problem. In 2021, it removed all radars from its cars and started rearchitecting its system to just use cameras using computer vision techniques trained on a neural net formed on its Dojo supercomputer. These algorithms run real-time thanks to its FSD chip which was co-developed by famed silicon engineer Jim Keller who has helped develop CPUs at AMD, Intel, and even the processor on the iPhone.
