Part 5/12:

Tesla's AI leadership is openly acknowledging the drawbacks of excess sensors like lidar. They highlight that additional sensors can introduce failure modes, which paradoxically make the system less reliable. This stance is reinforced by Luminar, once a leader in lidar technology, which has now filed for bankruptcy—an unmistakable market signal of who the true winner will be.

Tesla's approach emphasizes vision-based AI, with a focus on deep neural nets processing data from cameras alone, mimicking human sight. Tesla's strategy, informed by extensive real-world data collected from millions of vehicles, aims to develop an intelligence system capable of deep cognition—understanding complex environments, reasoning about situations, and making accurate decisions.