Late Friday evening on August 25th, Elon Musk drove around Palo Alto in his Model S Tesla with white seats and a kid’s car seat in the back. This was no ordinary drive, he allowed the vehicle to drive around the idyllic town with millions of viewers!
Using his iPhone and live streaming simultaneously on the X App, he explained the vehicle’s autonomy in real-time.
I was lucky enough to not only watch the broadcast live from my home in Austin, Texas, but I also got to report on it in real time as well!
Here’s what I call my “Drive Fun Summary” of Elon Musk’s amazing live stream!
DRIVE FUN SUMMARY
Since I am a writer I seized the opportunity to write about the drive while it was happening! Enjoy! It was a pleasure to watch (link to video below)!
THE HIGHLIGHTS
The near 45-minute drive began at the Tesla Engineering HQ and Elon pinned a random spot and engaged FSD beta V12. The car passed construction flawlessly. It also slowed down for a speed bump, based on what a human would do, not based on what a line of code told it to do. He mentioned the same is true for bicycles and stop signs. The car uses the neural net to decide – like a human would – to stop at a stop sign.
At a “round-about” Elon’s car waited for 2 cars, then took its turn. Elon said there is about 100 watts of inference compute (all local) on hardware 3. Elon explained that no internet connection is needed. It uses 8 cameras at 36 frames per second. The reality of the roads are based on 24 frames per second.
Elon joked, “Hello assassins if you want to get me, head to Palo Alto.” Thankfully Elon Musk stayed safe the entire livestream.
Elon said there are FSD test drivers in Japan, Europe, and all over the world.
The vehicle drove around students who were walking around the Stanford Campus. At another round-about, Elon reassured drivers there is no line of code for this, as it is trained on data.
Elon and his AI Engineer (also presenting the car) explained that Tesla’s data curation needs to be trained on excellent data, and not mediocre data. High quality data is always selected from the fleet.
When interventions occur in the fleet, it is integrated with training and then updated with the weights.
Elon invited viewers to edit his live video and speed it up.
On the drive, Elon did not have to intervene even once. He said that with traffic lights, there’s no code in V12 to say what light colors stand for. Instead, all training is done on neural nets.
For fun, Elon decided to head over to Mark Zuckerburg’s neighborhood in real-time. When he arrived it was just a bunch of homes on a street, not really Zuck’s home, which would have been surrounded with high security.
On the ride back to the Tesla Engineering HQ, here’s the main highlights:
– Ride was super SMOOTH, with Elon playing lovely Classical music
– Palo Alto reminds Elon of the perfection seen in the movie, “The Truman Show.”
– The car was very polite/conservative with Pedestrians and bicyclists, meaning it was cartious and slow around them (and so was Elon as he did not film them).
– Training is needed all around the world as the weather in California is too nice, and situations are needed with parades, people, etc.
– A successful unprotected LEFT turn onto a high-speed road was achieved.
– V12 will be ASS (meaning Smart Summon will work well)
– Intuitive Smooth speed-up in places (different than posted speed)
– Elon had lovely music playing (we would love Elon’s Playlist!)
– Tesla Engineering HQ is at the “former HP headquarters.” (an honor for Tesla). Note the Tesla HQ is Austin, Texas.
– Tesla parking lot was pretty full, even at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. How did FSD beta do, getting into the hectic parking lot? It went perfectly to the “pinned” spot!
– Pure AI driving does NOT have to have a map. It can do what a human would also do without a map.
If you would like to watch this video, you can here:
Save with Gail's Referral. Order Tesla products with Gail's Referral Link to earn cash off your order plus exclusive referral benefits. ts.la/gail74884 Here are a few more screen shots from the drive.
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