Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Does AP2's NN trickle down to AP1 development?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Who remembers where this comment was recently from a Tesla employee commenting on the challenge/need of merging AP1/AP2 codebases?
I think it was just misunderstanding.

What they really meant is there's a common codebase for everything from S to Truck (some bits on a side branches that are periodically merged with mainline - to avoid too much stuff leaking). Now there are compat modules so that the UI can talk to different kinds of hardware, be it different autopilots or body controllers or whatever.
So every time they add a new something there's a compatibility check in the code, but it does not mean they port latest ap2 firmware onto the pre-AP-style rain sensor because that makes no sense, but since firmware is mostly monolitic, they do carry around firmwares for all possible modules even if your particular car does not have that module, it's just not used in that case.
I did not look into AP1 firmware myself, but reportedly it did not change since Oct 2016 or some such, all the improvements people are seeing is due to changes outside of AP1.
 
Can you find a link?

For example mapping etc. might be an area where there might be useful overlap between AP1/AP2?
I saw the bit you reference, but cannot find it, was it on reddit perhaps?

the adas tiles are used on both ap1 and ap2 (but control logic for e.g. steering wheel limits might still be different). It appears to be certain that new autopilot maps are not intended to be used on ap1 cars, though.
 
Having an abstraction under AP2 that resembles the MobilEye API makes a lot of sense if the first goal is to hit AP1 parity. That would allow them to reach that goal with very little work other than the visual neural network. It would also explain why auto-wipers are the thing lagging behind, as that is the biggest hardware difference between the MobilEye and Tesla systems, and the Tesla neural net may not yet map well to the MobilEye outputs.

I wouldn't read much into there not being any AP1 changes since October 2016. That's right when AP2 came out, and AP2 is a higher priority and not even at parity yet. But once it gets there and exceeds AP1, I expect features to be backported where the AP1 hardware is sufficient.
 
  • Helpful
Reactions: AnxietyRanger
Thank you @verygreen. I tried looking for the reference/link too, but no luck yet.

Your speculation seems useful, though. My thinking was that if the APs were to share common firmware framework on some level (even if main code was completely different) that might guarantee continued updates to AP1 too. If not, that is less likely.

For example, Tesla has promised auto-highway exits to AP1 (December 2016 8.1). I wonder how will they implement the mapping for that? The ADAS tile sufficient?
 
I
Who remembers where this comment was recently from a Tesla employee commenting on the challenge/need of merging AP1/AP2 codebases?

I'd like to think I keep on top of things, so I apologize if I completely missed this, I'd really like to read the source and the context behind it.

I apologize if I come off a tad bit excessive, but frankly I think your out over your ski's on this one without the article and context to say what they were referring to.
 
For example, Tesla has promised auto-highway exits to AP1 (December 2016 8.1). I wonder how will they implement the mapping for that? The ADAS tile sufficient?

The maps are currently run exclusively on the APE for decisioning / vectoring. The new vahalla software will run on CID and I expect that will make it onto AP1 as a replacement for the navigon crap, but aside from that I don't think AP1 will get on ramp / to on ramp, but this last statement is puuuuuuure speculation on my part.
 
Not on AP1, I don’t think.

So Tesla will go back on their word?

This was posted in September, 2016, before AP2 announcement:

himlxhdbj3pwtdwacacv.png
 
So Tesla will go back on their word?

This was posted in September, 2016, before AP2 announcement:

himlxhdbj3pwtdwacacv.png

I specifically complained that this didn’t happen and was effectively told too bad. Since the owners manual doesn’t say it’s supposed to work, they don’t consider it a problem. Promises made don’t have to be met ever. Quite disappointing response that I actually got today.