I read through all of those criticisms from Reddit user u/whydoesthisitch. The comment history does not reflect mere technical criticism.
The user explicitly asserts that FSD is a fraudulent scam which Tesla has no intention of ever making into autonomous driving software, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is in the "cult". To be clear, they're saying not just that Tesla's approach will fail, but that Tesla isn't even
trying to make it succeed at anything other than marketing.
Other wild claims include that:
- "Dojo is nothing. They haven't even built it, and the theoretical specs they gave are already years behind the leading AI training chips. And that's ignoring the fact that they still need an interconnect and a compiler. It simply doesn't make any sense why Tesla would actually build this thing, and I'm confident they never will."
- FSD is "extremely rudimentary" and college students could make software with better self-driving performance in 2007
- Tesla collects a "tiny amount" of data from customer cars
- The data collected in not in a format useful for training their model anyway
- "Not even remotely suitable for training deep learning models"
- Even if the data were useful, Tesla has no backend infrastructure for using customer data
- "The variety and quality of sensor data collected by more advanced cars used by Waymo, Cruise, Nvidia, Mobileye and others is far more useful for actual training."
- "Tesla's claimed data advantage simply doesn't exist. Of actual usable training data, Tesla has far less than other companies in the field."
- Most of the AI industry views Tesla as a fraud and "Whenever one of our models vastly underperforms, or a test doesn't go as planned, people will all say to each other, 'at least we aren't Tesla.'"
- Tesla is "corner cutting in terms of ... processing hardware" (FSD computer)
- Tesla "doesn't follow standard design principles of iterating internally before a wider release"
- Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is less safe than subways
- Elon is not an engineer
- The cameras and hydranet Tesla is using can't possibly have resolution precision better than 1 meter for position and depth measurements with the available processing power
This person also claims to have recently received a job offer from Tesla but turned it down. How did they get a job offer? If this is how they feel about Tesla, surely they didn't apply. Is it really likely that Tesla would have sent them a job offer without applying despite clearly disagreeing with Tesla's approach? They further claim to know multiple AI engineers within Tesla who are saying they know the system won't work and are being micromanaged into working on a project they don't believe in while getting paid half what they could get elsewhere. This too makes no sense. Why aren't these supposed employees leaving to work for another company?
The fact that this account posts on r/RealTesla is not really a good sign of their critical thinking skills either. That's not a place where legitimate, well-reasoned criticism of Tesla can be found.
www.wsj.com
