Andrej Karpathy points out a GPT-like transformer in new Tesla FSD release

Tesla has released notes for the latest version of their Full Self-Driving Beta - 10.11. According to @WholeMarsCatalog, 10.11 was already in use by Tesla employees. If no bugs are detected in the version, it will be released to external users starting this week. The notes appear to be focused on cutting down unnecessary slowdowns in the model by making more accurate predictions about where other vehicles turn or merge. 

Andrej Karpathy, the director of AI at Tesla, who also heads the Autopilot Vision team, pointed out that his favourite update in the version was that a GPT-like transformer could now predict lanes and their connectivity. The notes state that besides being able to predict crossing lanes, the transformer also “allows computationally cheaper and less error-prone post-processing, and paves the way for predicting many other signals and their relationships jointly and end-to-end.” 

The FSD Beta v10.11’s release notes also show that it has improved Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) detection by 44.9 per cent by reducing false positives around cyclists and pedestrians. Tesla was able to manage this by increasing the data size of the next-gen autolabeler, training network parameters that used to be frozen and modifying the network loss functions. 

The previous version, Beta 10.10, took several weeks to roll out to testers. While there is hope that this version will be released quickly, if there are any additional issues spotted, the release will be pushed.