Business Insider came out with a bombshell this week, after interviewing several former Tesla employees, saying that the company is deliberately paying more attention to improving Autopilot on those routes taken by its CEO, Elon Musk, or the most influential video bloggers covering this topic. in USA.
Image Source: Tesla
An investigation by Business Insider showed that the process of processing video data coming from on-board cameras of Tesla electric vehicles for training autopilot systems is organized heterogeneously. Heads of specialized departments involved in data annotation insist on more thorough processing of data collected on certain routes. Although information processing technology does not allow Tesla specialists to judge whether a particular electric car belongs to a certain person, some of those who perform such work believe that the information collected from the cars of the head of the company is given special priority in terms of the quality of the annotations. Some employees were even paid overtime if they needed to urgently process data from some route, presumably related to the activities of Elon Musk.
There is another precedent in this story – one of the Tesla employees was allegedly fired due to a poor-quality annotation of a video fragment allegedly obtained from an electric car driven by Elon Musk. Poor quality processing led to the fact that the active driver assistance system behaved incorrectly in a certain situation, and this caused dissatisfaction with the authorities. Many former Tesla employees admit that they were tasked with annotating video data with extreme care, and judging by the travel routes, they had something to do with visiting the headquarters of Tesla, SpaceX and even Twitter during the purchase of the latter by Elon Musk in 2022. Until November 2021, Musk is believed to have owned a home in California, and the surrounding routes in selected videos from Tesla’s on-board cameras were also processed with special care by subject matter experts.
All this leads to the fact that, as experts note, Elon Musk, when using FSD, receives a noticeably higher quality of operation of the on-board automation of Tesla electric vehicles, since the routes he most often travels end up being more studied. This may give him a false impression of the real capabilities of on-board automation of electric vehicles of this brand. Tesla also pays attention to well-known bloggers in the United States, who make videos about the operation of FSD and often criticize this system. The company’s specialists admitted that some of the video recordings receive priority processing, similar to that typical for data received from Elon Musk’s alleged machines.
Tesla allegedly monitors the bloggers’ routes based on their reviews, and then, if necessary, sends test drivers to the area in test cars to gather additional information to improve the operation of the automation in a particular area. One of these bloggers, Chuck Cook, admitted that he often sees Tesla testers in company cars in the vicinity of his home, but all attempts to contact them are suppressed by company employees. Experts argue that there is nothing reprehensible in Tesla’s attention to the comments of bloggers, because this category of drivers has a special passion for finding “weak spots” in the software, and through their activities, in fact, helps to improve it.