As the project manager for a software team that needs to be larger than it is and we are always needing more thorough unit tests (aka we are hurting for people), there’s another big benefit to e2e control code.
Since your development team is now writing much less control code, you can now devote more of the team to unit tests. This may mean that the FSD team is able to write many more and more thorough unit tests to validate behavior and identify regressions.
This will be advantageous in several big ways, off the top of my head:
1. Unit tests are even more important with the “black box” nature of NN control code to ensure that we see many fewer regressions from one version to the next.
2. They will help reduce cycle time from version to version. Once the NN is retrained and the new network passes unit tests, you need less time validating that new network in the real world by employees before it can go wide.
This is another reason, along with more compute hardware, that the e2e approach should see significantly accelerated improvements compared to older versions.
The FSD team is now very close to achieving “Project Vacation”, the nearly fully-automated data engine that Karpathy spoke of many years ago, where improvements require much less effort by the team and the whole process gets more automated.
I assume the team will then devote more focus to highway and parking lot domains.