Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently revealed the electric car maker has achieved full self-driving capabilities after discovering and using a trove of recorded audio from customers yelling and swearing at their cars while it was driving.
During the experimental self-driving testing program, Tesla vehicles had been recording audio inside the car using microphones meant to help drivers and passengers interact with other features. But, unbeknownst to drivers and Tesla, this audio data was the crucial and missing component to unlocking a fully self driving car.
Internally dubbed the "Yell at the Car" data, engineers expanded existing neural networks by adding an innovative "speech-to-avoiding a crash" layer using 10 thousand hours of audio recordings. It consisted of panicked drivers screaming profanities and urgent warnings as their cars veered toward other vehicles, pedestrians, and various immovable objects.
Sources familiar with the development say phrases like "No, no, no! Watch out for that person!" and "Holy fucking shit, stay on the road!" provided especially rich training data. One particularly hair-raising shriek of "Slow down or we're all going to die!" is said to have helped the AI learn braking patterns under extreme threat conditions.
And while previous versions would steer toward pedestrians as their owners sat there beyond stressed and helpless, the new audio allowed the system to heed shouts of "Let me off this ride!" and "Woah, woah, woah. Ahhhhh!" with laser focus and adeptly avoid accidents.
"We realized that the best way to develop autonomous driving was to literally listen to, and in on, our customers, whether they like it or not," Musk explained. "Our neural nets picked up invaluable defensive skills from thousands of hours of natural reactions to our shockingly poor current functionality.”
With the addition of the powerful new training data, Tesla vehicles can now navigate complex environments seemingly flawlessly, all thanks to their owners’ rage-filled warnings.