Isn’t it obvious, that now 2.5 years (Sic!) later we can say, that for all practical purposes the video was completely fake. Even if Tesla years from now will develop functional FSD, it doesn’t change the fact, that the video per se was completely fake.
History has shown anonymous Tesla sources being quite often useful. But be that as it may it is still one potential source on the validity of that video that is supported by what is known of Tesla’s actual (lack of) progress — and there really aren’t many such sources. Musk for example clearly is not a reliable source for AP2 progress info... so what else do we have?
The self driving video was on a blog post titled from Oct 2016: All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware Notice how it doesn't say software. This was in the time period immediately after the AP1 MobilEye split and Tesla needed to show that, even though the feature set was currently reduced, the cars were capable of performing the tasks. The last paragraph is practically all disclaimer: Which echos the original AP blog post of October, 2014 October 2018: (it looks likes Tesla prefers even yeared Octobers for AP updates....)
True. At the end of the day, all we really have is what we actually get in our cars in an update. Everything else, especially Musk's quotes, are future telling which are subject to change. In terms of the 2016 video, I do think the reddit may be partially right. I do think Tesla probably did some hard coding to make the car do what it does in the video. I say this because we know for a fact from a talk Karpathy did, that at the time of the 2016 video, Tesla was using a so-called "software 1.0" approach to FSD, ie they were trying to hard code everything. So Tesla probably used AP1 software + hard coding to make the car do what it does in the video. I am speculating but Tesla probably thought back then that they could just hard code FSD and it would be "easy". Hence, why they started selling FSD and claiming it just needed regulatory approval. Of course, that method was woefully flawed which is why Tesla radically changed their approach and is now using machine learning to do FSD which is bearing much better fruit.
Why is there still debate on this? As far as the videos themselves, they are 100% real as far as the hardware did drive that route on its own. It was a hardware (mostly sensor) demonstration. It was never a demonstration of the software and that same software would never have worked on alternate routes besides the two it was trained on. The route itself was painstakingly trained upon hence the number of disengagements reported and the number of test vehicles making this exact same trip. We also know that some of the rules were hardcoded in. We know this specifically since Sterling Anderson had mentioned it in several talks. Remember that Andrej Karpathy didn't join Tesla until the middle of 2017 after Chris Lattner messed stuff up royally. In sum, there's nothing fake about the hardware demonstration, but it was just that, a demo. Remember Elon said:
After the release of hardware 2.0, Sterling, who was actually qualified for that role since he has a history in assisted driving, failed to deliver software parity with AP 1.0 by the end of 2016. Chris, who might be qualified to lead but definitely not qualified for that role, then came in forced a major rewrite of the NN architecture and also failed to delivery parity in 6 months. He was then ousted for not producing results and generally wasting everyone's time. In addition, later Tesla was subjected to the lawsuit about failing to deliver software parity in a timely manner forcing them to issue partial refunds. Andrej, who actually is qualified for that role, comes in, has the team do yet another rewrite to finally achieve parity with AP 1.0. I feel that if Andrej would have come on board sooner they could have saved six months or, in the least, moved the timeline forward.
What kind of revisonary history is this? Sterling didn't fail to deliver parity by end of 2016, it was impossible and not only that but to deliver EAP aswell that elon was claiming. The amount of deflection from obvious lies that elon says is amazing. Sterling didn't fail. Elon lied plain and simple. Lastly it took Andrej 12 months to achieve anything resembling parity in performance with AP1 and this is with all the leg work, firmware and software framework that had already been done before he took over. yet elon wanted EAP by end of 2016, not even just AP1 parity.
Funny thing is, i’ve been under the impression, that U.S. is the promised land of class action lawsuits and “see you in court”, yet Tesla customers just bend over...
Interestingly for all his prowess Andrej Karpathy hasn’t been able to reach AP1 parity in speed-sign recognition and rain sensing. MobilEye has done the former for over a decade and dedicated sensors have done the latter even longer. The rain sensing in AP2 is close to useless and of course speed-signs are not sensed at all.
rain sensing works ok during daylight for me. Dedicated sensors use a different idea so they are not really comparable.
Of course because AP2 lacks an active light source for rain-sensing. Why did they have to shoot themselves in the foot over this too?
AP0 and AP1 both used part #1011582-00-C for rain sensing, so I'm not sure what you are getting at...
Of course? As I said, dedicated sensors have done this for years. My point is Karpathy has not been able to match their performance.
@JeffK The EAP Design Studio text did fool a lot of people believing EAP would be ready by December 2016 though.
ME has a patent on sign recognition, so Tesla has to get around that. And of course, the CV based rain detection will never work in the dark.
Right, but that was a feature on the car at the same time as AP1, not a feature of AP1. That Karpathy has any rain sense working is feature beyond AP1 unless AP1 had a method to indicate to the car that it needed the windshield cleaned.
It certainly did, yes, I don't know if anyone expected that kind of delay... I mean even in this timeframe George Hotz demoed his own version (obviously not to the same standard, but goes to show you can crank out something even remotely similar in a short timeframe especially when you already have the expertise.) When asked about how much of the data from AP 1.0 they could reuse for 2.0 Sterling said nearly all of it.
Of course but that’s splitting hairs. Tesla decided to solve rain-sensing differently between AP1 and AP2 cars and Karpathy (amonst others) was tasked to solve this for AP2+ cars. So far they have pretty much failed in my books. I am of course not blaming Karpathy for the decision to leave out a rain-sensor. He was not there then.