Comment by codelord

Previously I worked at Waymo for a year on the perception module of the self driving car. Based on what I know about the state of the art of computer vision, I can pretty much guarantee that current Tesla cars will never be autonomous. This is probably a huge risk for the investors of Tesla, because currently Tesla is selling a fully-autonomous option on its car which will never happen with current hardware. We need several breakthroughs in computer vision for no-fail image based object detection, and you will need higher resolution cameras, and much much more compute power to be able to process all the images. It's hard to estimate when we will reach that level of advancement in computer vision, my most optimistic wild guess is 10-20 years. And then Tesla will need to upgrade all those cameras and install a dedicated TPU which should be at least 10x or probably more faster than the nVidia chip they have installed on their cars, and they should do it for zero dollars because they have already sold the option. It is kinda amazing that Elon Musk is selling cars based on speculative future breakthroughs in technology. That must be a first.