In 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) logged 758 complaints about Teslas suddenly decelerating for no reason on American highways (NHTSA ODI, 2022).
Drivers describe their vehicles “slamming the brakes” out of nowhere, with one shaken owner telling reporters, “It just slammed the brakes”.
These aren’t isolated glitches. U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis recently gave the green light to a class-action lawsuit, citing allegations that Tesla knowingly withheld warnings about this dangerous defect.
I’m increasingly convinced that while AI in general had a big leap forward a few years ago, since then there’s some mass hysteria type effect where everyone seems convinced that it’s been getting steadily better at the same rate - when I’ve not been able to see any of that.
I keep reading all these benchmarks that are supposedly destroyed every three months, but they never seem to turn into any noticeable improvements when I use the damn things. It’s now at the stage where if someone tries to tell me otherwise I just assume they’re either a bot themselves, or falling for some kind of hysteria/confirmation bias type effect.
So, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if autopilot literally was getting worse as they try forcing more data into it and getting nothing but overfit. It was already as good as it was going to be based on its fundamentals, which is to say, not good enough.