[bobsomers]

> That was one of the major points of the talk - the vision-only system is more accurate than the one with other modalities thrown in, even though the latter has more data. We intuit that the fusion network should just learn to ignore the bad sensor when it's unreliable, but this rarely happens in practice.

This makes some important assumptions, namely that Tesla built a lidar and radar perception pipelines and sensor fusion of equivalent quality to their competitors, and then decided they were unnecessary.

Given that their competitors have shown substantially better perception than Tesla, and that Tesla has a significant economic incentive to deliver autonomous driving on a sensor suite that already shipped years ago, I find that difficult to believe. Did Tesla build good enough perception to dismiss lidar and radar purely on their merits. Unlikely I think. Did an intern build a student-quality lidar pipeline that "proved" Elon's camera-first approach is the right one? More likely.

[jiofih]

Karpathy joined Tesla way before they ditched radar. You’re saying it’s more likely that he based his work on a “student-quality” prototype?