[jfim]

Oh I see what you mean.

Typically, inference in a machine learning context means feeding a model some input and looking at its output. I'm pretty sure that they are running some model on the vehicle that takes pixels as input and says this part of the image is a car/truck/traffic sign/lane line/etc. It might be misclassifying things (eg. the flower as a red light), but would still be running some kind of model.

As you point out though, the model only seems to do some simple object detection, but doesn't have much of an understanding of what it sees (eg. does it make sense that there would be a traffic light at this location). There are plenty of videos of it getting confused by all kinds of situations (eg this one from a few years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-fsd-full-self-driving-... ).