Tesla is going nowhere without LiDAR.

I strongly disagree. Go look at the videos of the current iteration of FSD.

Yes, then read this article: https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-fsd-is-biased-towards-influe...

Go and actually test drive one and let it FSD you around. Videos don’t do justice. There is always MKBHD kind of biased videos.

O3 can now play geoguessr better than master level human players. It can also beat master level Codeforces competitive programmers. I wouldn't discount the ability of AI to make sense of images far better than humans possibly could, all the while beating them at logical thinking, especially in a restricted domain like driving.

AI isn’t magic. If there isn’t enough information in the inputs, you can’t expect reliable results. It’s the same principle in all of software: garbage in, garbage out.

If there simply isn’t enough visual information, vision-only will fail.

https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ

Theoretically, if there's not enough visual information for AI drivers, then there's not enough visual information for human drivers, and that's a problem with the road. (Which, to be sure, occasionally there are roads like this: e.g. merging onto a higher-speed thoroughfare from a lower level, with a very short distance between "where you're in a position to see the merging traffic (and not that much of it)" and "where the roads have fully merged (and there's no shoulder)".)

This Mark Rober video has been debunked several times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cxTO8g47_k

That is not a debunking... That's someone running a similar experiment and getting a different result. That would debunk the claim that Teslas can never detect a painted wall. It does not debunk the claim that Teslas will sometimes fail to detect a painted wall.

And in a safety-critical system, the distinction is not mere pedantry.

I mean he didn't even use FSD.

[delayed]

headlights can make cameras see in the dark

Left and right of the car? What about behind it?

Waymo has 360-degree LIDAR and, not coincidentally, is the state of the art.

It also has the help of being able to do web searches and when o3 fails, it doesn’t kill people.

Spinning lidar is not a panacea.