AI expert here, but more in the natural language processing area, but I can extrapolate autopilot.
Short answer - Not possible.
Long answer -
You need 4 ingredients to make the L5 autopilot pizza,
- a) 360 degree situational awareness
- b) Fleet learning
- c) Data crunching both in real time (like your head does), and learned (like your head does)
- d) A computer and a powersource to support all this.
360 degree situational awareness
Compare it with your head, you have stereoscopic vision, but it's mounted on an axis (your neck). AP camera is not, radar does not have enough resolution.
Cameras are vastly inferior to eyes, except we can make cameras good in a single dimension.
Military drone cameras cost millions, and they get around the whole problem with brute force (very clear lenses, huge aperture, massive CCDs) ~ but then they produce so much data. A car with a 90kwh battery can't run a computer powerful enough to process all that in real time.
Fleet Learning
I don't think they are taking advantage of their 'high resolution maps' just given how the system behaves so far, and that is the 'learning' bit that your head is so good at, and Tesla just isn't. And I don't think they will be able to take advantage of the high-rez-maps either - not to the extent they'd like you to believe, simply because the car neither has enough data storage, nor enough computational power, nor a power source to support that kind of computation. Basically that "fleet learning" thing - that's way oversold than what Tesla can realistically ever deliver. However, no way to measure the success of that ;-) so they can get away with that bluff. Story of corporate America, the judge (you) is dumber than the criminals (Tesla). Anyway, so what they CAN do is to improve their algorithms based on data. I don't think they are doing that greatly yet either. i.e. they are not considering every car's data. That may actually not be necessary even for what they are trying to achieve for now.
What they cannot do you drive 15 mins before me, and swerve a pothole, and my Tesla magically learns from your experience without a programmer in freakmont writing a line of code - BS! Not happening.
Data crunching both in real time (like your head does), and learned (like your head does)
Data crunching in real time ~ oh crap that bickhead is just swerved into my lane cuz he was texting and driving.
Learned - it's friday night, better be extra careful of honda civics with coke can exhausts and underbody lights.
With AI, we could extrapolate missing bits of info, but this won't happen for 3 reasons,
-- Human beings do not possess the ability to write complex software, not to that level on that hardware on a mobile platform.
-- Neither do we have the necessary hardware to process all that in a small enough power efficient enough package to mount on a car.
-- Your head is a computer, with stereoscopic forward vision, but it has a ridiculous amount of computational power and far superior algorithms to what Tesla is writing (okay that was below the belt, snicker).
-- Your head cannot do L5 under all situations either. Can you drive in fog? In a downpour? snowstorm?
Now with AP2 hardware, can we do it? Sorry nope!
We have the necessary 'cameras' and 'sensors' but not the necessary software, or the hardware to run that software.
However, we can get pretty damn close, for 90% of the time.
Tesla is taking the logical path here, to use Linux/GCC/graphics card acceleration repurposed for AP computation. Basically they are brute forcing computation at the problem and reacting as fast as they can to give you the illusion of FSD .. which is good enough for majority of the situations.
A computer and a powersource to support all this.
So the 'learned' portion - is some bonehead in freakmont learning for the computer and writing out code. But the real time learning replacing that bonehead - well, its possible, one day. But we need vastly superior hardware than we have today. If we did, countries wouldn't be racing each other in making the best super computer possible, while not really explaining what the hell they use them for.
Summary,
With AP2 and the current hardware Tesla will be able to give you the illusion of FSD that will actually work in 80-90% situations, which is plenty good and fairly impressive. However, it's not as sci-fi as Elon is trying to sell you. And yes, it's a shame that no other auto-manufacturer can figure this out. PS: This is the internet, so I guess I pulled off being an expert pretty well, no?
