Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, touted by CEO Elon Musk himself, should be the next big revolution in self-driving, but it now faces a cloud since recent charges went public that the technology was optimized only for Musk and a very small group of influencers. Sources inside Tesla told a new report on Business Insider that the company was tailoring its FSD neural nets to the regular travels of him and the popular content creators.
For years, Musk has been a public cheerleader for Tesla’s Autopilot capabilities, sometimes pleading with the public to try the technology or watch videos online that will allegedly show its prowess. But the videos produced by Musk from testing come a long way from how the typical Tesla driver in the world at large, especially outside California, has been using the system.
In a report from Business Insider, interviews with more than a dozen current and former Tesla employees reveal that workers who make Musk’s Tesla vehicles say that images and short videos provided by his cars get picked apart with extraordinary attention to detail. Data from “VIP” high-profile video posters on YouTube who routinely post content of their FSD, used identifying software fixes. Such selective attention tilts the balance in road tests between Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD toward showing routes driven by Musk and other influencers in drives.
One former Tesla employee said it seemed like “It seemed like we were purposely making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was. It felt dishonest.” A report describes how even the data annotators themselves, whose job was to review clips from Tesla vehicles to train the self-driving neural nets, were pushed to emphasize routes around Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter locations, plus a mansion, which he has since sold, that Musk used to own.
It’s the privileging of data from “VIP” users, the very people most likely to share their experiences online, that raises questions over just how representative those experiences are. While some Tesla staff have tried defending Elon Musk’s dual role by saying he is both CEO and beta tester, for others, this approach seems very disproportionate to the performance of the software in different driving conditions.
Electrek, an electric vehicle publication, said that although this is valuable, it borderlines astroturfing. As emphasized, with much repetition, Musk himself kept telling people to go watch these very same influencers to understand how FSD works for them with videos of extraordinary experiences customers had with FSD.
The implications are huge. In such selective optimization, Tesla can intensify work on a few routes and styles of behavior at the expense of overlooking critical issues most people face, hence delaying the point at which it would be truly reliable to all users.
As Tesla pushes its autonomous driving software into increasingly challenging driving situations, the company must ensure that its FSD system works reliably across extremely broad spans of driving conditions and user scenarios. Tesla has been pushing lately for more openness and fairness in resource distribution when it comes to self-driving tech development.