"In 2022, Elon Musk made a gamble that rattled his top engineers. The Tesla CEO scrapped the ultrasonic sensors that helped power the company's self-driving technology, and its vehicles began relying entirely on cameras. No other self-driving car company had attempted anything like it. Complicating matters was the recent departure of Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's director of AI at the time. That left Ashok Elluswamy, then Tesla's head of Autopilot software, to carry out one of Musk's biggest bets."
"Lewey Geselowitz, a former Autopilot engineer, said the team spent months training the software to run without the sensors. He recalled Elluswamy huddling inside a Tesla with a group of engineers, driving around the office parking lot. They were testing the system to see whether it would recognize objects in its path, intentionally almost slamming into walls in the process."
"For over a decade, Musk has promised that self-driving cars are right around the corner. Achieving full autonomy would be the difference between the company "being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero," he's said. More recently, he has highlighted Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot program, as another key cog in the company's future, estimating that it may one day account for roughly 80% of Tesla's value."
Tesla removed ultrasonic sensors in 2022 and shifted its self-driving stack to rely solely on cameras. Ashok Elluswamy led the engineering effort after Andrej Karpathy's departure, retraining software and overseeing risky real-world tests to validate camera-only perception. Engineers spent months testing object recognition and edge-case scenarios, deliberately approaching obstacles to ensure detection. Within a year, Tesla eliminated the sensors from all new builds and rolled out Full Self-Driving publicly. Musk positioned full autonomy and the Optimus humanoid robot program as central to Tesla’s future value. Elluswamy rose from a 2014 Autopilot founding member to vice president of AI software and led a robotaxi launch in Austin.
Read at Business Insider
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