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Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Aug 15, 2022
Watch this full-screen with the sound on!
Here's a Tesla with the Full Self Driving beta release driving through some of the toughest driving conditions imaginable.
I love this video because it shows San Francisco (my home town) to full effect. (I know these streets like the back of my hand.) The Tesla starts out near the University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus (Neuralink's building is nearby) and heads north past the SF Giants bayside ballpark. It passes through the South of Market neighborhood (once a warehouse district now filled with start-ups). It crosses Market Street (crazy hard for drivers, with cars, pedestrians and bicycles coming in all directions) and rolls through the Financial District and Chinatown (Chinese drivers and pedestrians are all crazy) onto Columbus Street in North Beach and ends up Nob Hill at Coit Tower. I love it!
The car handles it like a champ, even though I see the people in the car flinching a bit. And to think that just a few years ago in the days of the DARPA challenges, the idea of an autonomous AI robot car successfully performing city driving would have been absolute science-fiction. As Elon likes to say, people don't realize it, but Tesla isn't just a car company, it's one of the world's leading AI and robotics companies as well.
Production Teslas come with all the sensors to do this and owners have the option of allowing Tesla to download everything the car "experiences". More than a million vehicles are doing it. This totals gazillions of terabytes of data about how the cars "perceive" every imaginable road condition, at every speed, from any angle, that all go into Tesla's "Dojo", one of the world's most powerful supercomputers (vertically integrated Tesla built it themselves with their own in-house chips) that serves as the world's largest and most advanced neural-network training computer that trains (not programs) the super deep neural networks that are the heart of the Tesla AI pattern-recognition abilities.
The 'dashboard" screen in the video shows that in action, displaying what the car is "aware" of at every moment. It's not as simple as it sounds, since the cars' computers need to be able to turn raw pixels into cars, trucks, motorcycles, pedestrians, all with their velocities, etc., even as it perceives lane markers, traffic lights, speed limits and so on. (I recently read about the first time a Tesla in Texas found itself on a road behind a horse. It couldn't decide if it was a dog or a pedestrian. The image on the dash screen kept switching between those. But it knew something was there even if it couldn't identify what it was, and the car avoided hitting it.) Every time a Tesla gets confused and the confusion is reported back to the Dojo, all of the subsequent Teslas are trained what to do. They learn not just from their own experience, but from the experience of a million other Teslas. (And even the earlier Teslas get upgrade downloads.)
More on Tesla AI and the Dojo supercomputer:
https://hackernoon.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-tesla-dojo-supercomputer
The amazing and inspirational video:
https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1557583102481801218
This has the potential to totally revolutionize drunk driving. Just tell your car "Take me home!" and it does! The AI is always focused and its "mind" never wanders.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Aug 15, 2022
The extraordinary cross-SF video in the post above has been taken down. Well, here's another one by the same guy that's just as good. It goes from Bernal Heights (a middle class neighborhood in the south central part of SF) to the Marina (exceedingly upscale located along the bayfront). It doesn't pass through downtown though. The trip is entirely FSD (full self-driving) and the Tesla is forced to deal with pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcycles, Amazon Prime delivery trucks blocking lanes, cross traffic and all the other challenges of urban driving. It even backs into a parking spot. (Watch on full-screen with sound on, the music is great.)
I particularly like comparing the view in real life to what is displayed on the screen: what the car is "aware" of. The blue line snaking out in front like a weird tactile feeler represents what the car "wants" to do. (It's hard not to use everyday human psychological vocabulary when describing an AI.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - C C - Aug 16, 2022
(Aug 15, 2022 12:13 AM)Yazata Wrote: [...] This has the potential to totally revolutionize drunk driving. Just tell your car "Take me home!" and it does! The AI is always focused and its "mind" never wanders.
At their favorite liquor spots, drunken Amish men -- wasted in their buggies -- have long depended on their horses to respond to that very command (and often without it even being issued). Nice to see today's technology recovering those lost conveniences of the past.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - stryder - Aug 16, 2022
(Aug 16, 2022 05:33 AM)C C Wrote:(Aug 15, 2022 12:13 AM)Yazata Wrote: [...] This has the potential to totally revolutionize drunk driving. Just tell your car "Take me home!" and it does! The AI is always focused and its "mind" never wanders.
At their favorite liquor spots, drunken Amish men -- wasted in their buggies -- have long depended on their horses to respond to that very command (and often without it even being issued). Nice to see today's technology recovering those lost conveniences of the past.
Kind of reminds me of how entitled people are now adays:
In the UK it costs around £12,000 a year for horse livery (if you kept a horse stabled).
This years BMW 8 series is 530hp, that means it's the equivalent of 530 Horses.
Thats the equivalent of £6,360,000 a year. Yet drivers of such cars will moan about a 50p-£1 fuel hike.
Even a Punto (75hp) driver should realise they are pretty darn entitled (equivalent of £900,000 per annum)
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Aug 17, 2022
From San Francisco down I-5 to SpaceX in Hawthorne.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Aug 18, 2022
(Aug 16, 2022 05:33 AM)C C Wrote:(Aug 15, 2022 12:13 AM)Yazata Wrote: [...] This has the potential to totally revolutionize drunk driving. Just tell your car "Take me home!" and it does! The AI is always focused and its "mind" never wanders.
At their favorite liquor spots, drunken Amish men -- wasted in their buggies -- have long depended on their horses to respond to that very command (and often without it even being issued). Nice to see today's technology recovering those lost conveniences of the past.
All Tesla needs to do now is find some way for Teslas to mate and make more little Teslas. And maybe generate electricity from grass.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Sep 3, 2022
Another Tesla self-driving music video, this time driving through most of the northeast quadrant of San Francisco, including downtown, at night.
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Sep 14, 2022
This is kind of funny. Self-driving Tesla is safely stopped at a railroad crossing, but look at the screen to see what it "thinks" is passing in front of it.
https://twitter.com/JGrupe/status/1569339557715361792
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Yazata - Sep 25, 2022
Extraordinary video with two guys, one an Australian visitor, discussing what the car is doing each moment while visiting San Francisco's Presidio and Fort Point, faced with all kind of challenges that would tax a human like traffic lights out, winding roads, difficult visual conditions, countless bicyclists and unpredictable pedestrians. Pointing out moments when the car is confused, when it's being extra-cautious, and how it resolves each situation. Additional discussion of when it will be available to all Tesla owners, international expansion and the challenges implicit in that, and acceptance by regulators. Excellent real-time commentary
RE: Tesla FSD Beta Drives Itself thru Downtown San Francisco - Kornee - Oct 15, 2022
Perfect weather day for a drive. Recall seeing a vid where they have done lots of simulated bad weather self-driving and it seems to handle it well.
What never came up in the conversation is the matter of how proof the system is against malicious actor hacking/spoofing attacks.
IIRC at least one perhaps more fatal crashes in the past (maybe not Tesla models) have been put down to that. Perfect crime scenario.
That prospect will likely be on many folks minds.