Elon Musk revealed in a post on the “X” platform yesterday that Tesla is now working on the final piece of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) artificial intelligence (AI) puzzle, called “vehicle control”. The goal is to have fully autonomous driving capabilities by the end of this year.
Vehicle control is the final piece of the Tesla FSD AI puzzle. That will drop >300k lines of C++ control code by ~2 orders of magnitude.
It is training as I write this. Our progress is currently training compute constrained, not engineer constrained.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 1, 2023
Level 4 and Level 5 self-driving is what Elon Musk refers to as “fully autonomous driving”. As a result, Tesla’s cars with the embedded AI system will be able to perform a variety of driving tasks completely on their own, without the assistance of a human.
According to Musk, the final and most important phase of Tesla’s FSD AI research is “vehicle control”. The original FSD code will be greatly simplified as a result of this development, with more than 300,000 lines of C++ control code reduced by almost two orders of magnitude.
According to experts at the international news site Electrek, Musk’s comment demonstrates Tesla’s aim to make more frequent use of AI-based decision-making, rather than just following hard-coded commands. In this way, Tesla hopes to accelerate the adoption of autonomous driving technologies.
However, despite the optimistic statement, Tesla’s FSD Beta still has a number of obvious shortcomings. For Tesla customers using the FSD Beta, it is still difficult to imagine a seamless transition to Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy in the near future.
In addition, the successful deployment of Tesla’s full self-driving technology will require regulatory approvals. The regulatory environment is a critical component in the deployment of autonomous cars, and it casts doubt on Tesla’s ability to meet its ambitious target of launching the FSD beta by the end of this year.
In conclusion, while Elon Musk’s statement shows significant progress in Tesla’s autonomous driving research, there are still obstacles and regulatory requirements to overcome. It may seem ambitious for Tesla to implement fully autonomous driving by the end of the year, but it is still unclear how the technological and regulatory landscape will evolve over the next few months.
