johnmodely
Member
I’m not sure where I sit on this atm .. first I always felt the big problem was the basic computer vision .. finding roads and cars etc. This seems to be close, as the car recognition is damn good so far as I can see from the videos. However there is still a lot of work on the car understanding what it sees in terms of expected behavior, and all the myriad variations on signage and lane markings. Unlike the vision problem, this seems to me to be a linear problem (expert system) which means we are likely to see slow and steady progress as the rule set grows, rather than any big breakthrough. What this implies for the release schedule I do not know. Possibly it means that FSD is less of an “if’ and more of a “when” than before, but it’s probably some time away still.
Correct....computer "Vision" has been solved and Tesla's system is probably superior to humans at this point now that true 3D vision is out and working properly. Car has no issue determining what is a road, where it should drive, road signs/traffic lights etc. Just recognizing the world in general.
But thats not the issue nor has it ever been IMO. The issue is the true magic of decision making, and the current system is still pretty dumb. Im pretty sure there is no decision neural nets, or at least they are very basic. Most of the decision making is probably thousands of if/then statements. This will be the true problem to solve.
You can really see this happening in one of the recent FSD Beta videos (cant remember exactly which one), but it was essentially behind slow traffic and the car could not determine whether it should go around it or not (it incorrectly tried to go around it into on-coming traffic).
Just this small case happens dozens of times that are second nature to us, but almost impossible to solve for a non-sentient computer program. How do you program for this case? When should the car stay in traffic and go with it, or go around a car like in light traffic? This is almost impossible to program with if/then statements, and Neural nets are great for vision and very narrow case decision making, but suck at broad AI which is what decision making in a driving environment is.
This type of AI is a long way off, and would require some new advancements in the field that actually come close to machine sentience to solve. The car will literally need to be AWARE of ITSELF and understand everything else around its and whats happening. For the example above, there is no programming logic that can explain to the car, oh we are in heavy traffic, there is a long line of cars ahead of us and we should not attempt to go around it. Right now they are just programing in corner cases one by one, and this will probably get it close enough eventually for FSD, but no where near level 5.