Here are the reasons I believe we’ll see FSD sooner rather than later:
1) There should be enough compute power available today to not only train networks, but also to evolve novel and suitable networks. This assumes Tesla has the data and I believe they do, though, yes, labeling is likely a serious bottleneck. Mammalian vision is an evolved system; it should be possible to evolve a suitable system with enough compute power.
2) There are decent models of a lot of the functions of the human brain, including vision, memory, sensorimotor control, and reinforcement learning. These models could be used to guide or seed the evolution of the networks. That many people are unaware of these models is no reason to believe that Musk and Tesla are unaware of them — even if they don’t speak about them. I’m partial to the work of Stephen Grossberg (
Stephen Grossberg - Wikipedia) and his colleagues at what was once the Cognitive and Neural Systems Department at Boston University (
CNS Classes | Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems).
3) Thinking like a futurist, we are overdue for this development as I estimate human technological progress. Read Kurzweil (
Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia ) as a starting place on estimating technological progress. Remember, experts tend to overestimate what can happen in the short run and underestimate what can happen in the long run. I’m afraid I was a couple decades early on neural networks, so for me this
is the long run.
I was a few years late on coming to mobile and iOS. I like to think I’m getting more accurate at forecasting and that I’m bang on with Tesla.
Since Musk appears satisfied with their sensor suite and now aims for people to be able at least to commute to work without a single intervention, I take this to mean FSD is working quite well though still needing (relatively few ) corrections. Thus, I think Tesla is actually far along a viable path, but not quite there.
They are now working, in my guesstimation, to slay a couple more 9’s in their FSD March of Nines. Perhaps it’s still just a way of saying "Elon said so," but if anyone can fight exponentials with exponentials it’s Tesla (referring for example to the three orders of magnitude improvement in labeling mentioned by Elon in the most recent earnings call).