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Tesla will release a major Autopilot rewrite to the general public in a few months, but in the near future, it will be in beta testing with Early Access owners who have agreed to do so.

Today Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared new details about the totally revamped Autopilot. He wrote that the private beta release will begin in 2-4 weeks. The first public testing will be done by some early access owners in 4-6 weeks. Only after these two stages have been passed and there are no unexpected major setbacks, all Tesla owners in the US will have access to the "new" Autopilot. According to this schedule, this should happen in mid-December.

Releasing private beta in 2 to 4 weeks, public beta (early access owners who opt in) 4 to 6 weeks after that, then all US Tesla owners mid December. Above schedule is contingent upon not encountering major unexpected setbacks.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2020

This release will be a major improvement on FSD, and will instantly render a quantum leap in the development of Autopilot. Now Autopilot will receive simultaneous surround video from 8 cameras--referred to by Musk as "4D." All frames will be stitched into one frame, and then video segments will be created for marking and training.

This process is difficult to implement since all cameras overlap in different ways. Tesla's team had to rewrite everything from the labeling tools themselves to training to inference. However, the company has been successful thus far.

Exactly. Problems like that have been addressed.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2020

During the Earnings Call for Q2 2020, Musk said:

"It's capable of things that if you just look - looking at things as individual pictures as opposed to video - basically, like you could go from like individual pictures to surround video. So, it's fundamental ...

So, that architectural change, which has been underway for some time but has not really been rolled out to anyone in the production fleet, is what really matters for full self-driving."

Musk also reaffirmed that he uses the bleeding edge alpha build in his car, which requires almost zero interventions between home and work. This tells us that Tesla is already very close to reaching Level 5 of autonomy.

“I’m extremely confident that level five or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think, will happen very quickly,” said Musk, at the 2020 World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.

“I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level five autonomy. I think — I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year," he elaborated.

After Musk's speech at the conference, most people were critical of his words. However, they missed a very important fact: Tesla's CEO has information that no one else knows, so he can best calculate how quickly Tesla will reach Level 5 autonomy.

 

Putting the whole puzzle together, given the latest updates released and information received from Musk, it becomes clear that humanity will soon have access to Level 5 autonomy.

© 2020, Eva Fox. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter

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