Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta V9.0 is soon going live. Being a .0 update, that means it’s a major one. This update will switch to pure vision, and Elon Musk just shared on Twitter that it will indeed come with “massive” improvements. This update from Elon Musk came in the form of a reply to @WholeMarsBlog, who was sharing another video of his own current version of FSD Beta. “You’re going to love trying it on your own car,” he noted.
Almost ready with FSD Beta V9.0. Step change improvement is massive, especially for weird corner cases & bad weather. Pure vision, no radar.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
Elon added that the update helps the system to handle weird corner cases and bad weather much better. Owen Sparks asked a follow-up question about removing the radar from production or having it as a backup. Elon confirmed that it will be removed. This will of course cut vehicle costs a bit.
Remove
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
Although this may seem like big news, it actually isn’t news. This isn’t the first time Elon has talked about the fact that Tesla will not use radar as a supplement to vision. Dr. Know-it-all Knows It All explained this in his YouTube video last month when he noted that most of the media didn’t pick up on this topic.
Elon tweeted:
“Given significant architectural changes, including fundamental improvements to pure vision, there is limited value to testing 8.x. Hoping to upload V9.0 & button next month,” last month.
Presumably, with the V9.0 update that is “almost ready,” the many Tesla owners who have been waiting for that button, which will allow anyone in the US who purchased FSD to download the much-improved system, very happy.
The other tweet Dr. Know It All brought up was one that Elon shared on March 12:
“FSD Beta has now been expanded to ~2000 owners & we’ve also revoked beta where drivers did not pay sufficient attention to the road. No accidents to date. Next significant release will be in April. Going with pure vision — not even using radar. This is the way to real-world AI.”
I didn’t see any news article covering was the fact that there were no accidents with FSD Beta — something that is a great bit of news. Any accident involving Tesla is in the news, and presented as if the Tesla itself was at fault, so the fact that there are no accidents so far with FSD Beta should be considered a great thing.
However, that’s not what blew the doctor’s mind. It was the latter part of Elon’s tweet referring to pure vision, not using radar, and the way to real-world AI. “It really seems like nobody has paid attention to this. He is saying that they are stripping away everything except for vision for the AI systems,” the doctor emphasized in his video.
So, everyone else is designing self driving using expensive LIDAR. Tesla is using inexpensive cameras and RADAR. Now the Artificial Intelligence is so good no RADAR is needed. The world changes with next FSD update. https://t.co/1pHwrMOhnF
— Mai Tai and I 🍹🌴 (@lee_mccaleb) April 9, 2021
He noted that he would hope Tesla keeps radar as a backup but pointed out that it sounded like Tesla was going all-in on vision only. From Elon’s response to Owen, it seems that’s exactly what Tesla is doing. This just goes to show how far AI has advanced. It’s advanced to the point that it is being used by Tesla for its FSD software with much less hardware than was previously thought possible — even by Elon Musk.
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