I think hes just pointing out Tesla autopilot team have put in a metric *sugar* ton of work into this and it's no small achievement.
Agree. Very interesting and thought provoking.
I think he is tongue-in-cheek because he is trying to walk a high-wire line of doing relevant reverse-engineering without revealing too much, raising the ire of Tesla legal or Musk.
One way to read it is plausible deniability: 'I was just dreaming'. There is also a tone of almost disbelief - they are further along than he thought: It is too good to be true.
His observations re. all the settings and meta-data/annotation/'augmented reality' are interesting. Maybe it is not either-or: Either classical programming, or ML/AI/Neural nets. Maybe the ML builds up a really detailed world-view - maybe more detailed than perhaps thought to make sense previously.
What are the potential benefits? Well, first of all the real-world understanding seem to be highly detailed. If it is also correct then this means that the ML-layer generating this is very good. Then that high-level world understanding is then served up to a different software layer. This layer can then drive the car - or illustrate it driving. (Some of the parameters seem game-like in that they offer the ability to fine-tune rendering of visual representation)
Is the driving layer traditionally coded or ML? We don't know. Would it make sense to have to 2 different ML-layers, one for world-view generation, and one for driving? Maybe it is legacy stuff, because the old driving software (and maybe still is) was traditionally coded.
Perhaps it still makes sense to keep this architecture to have a lot of hyper-parameters for tuning various stuff. The separation of concern also allows for debugging or verification scenarios. For developers, this would be observer-modes, debugging, or meta-observer modes.
For more visually inclined, think West World late season 2 where Maeve has the vertigo-inducing sensation of observing herself thinking, and speaking, and thinking about thinking (and thinking about thinking about ..) and early season 3 where Bernard either hacks, self-diagnoses or does a repository-rollback to another version of himself, depending on what base-layer of reality you initially assume.
(Disclaimer: I don't have any deep background in AI/ML)
