Thread by @Aiaddict1

(1/12) In light of the #FX / #Hulu documentary “Elon Musk’s Crash Course” I thought I’d share a short tidbit about my time on #Tesla #Autopilot team.

I originally joined under a narrative that #FSD was saving peoples lives on a daily basis. Every day I would preach to all my

2/ friends and family about Elon and all the great work Tesla was doing!

I eventually I bought my own Tesla so I could experience the “life saving technology” I was helping to train…. Or so I believed.

Once I got my hands on FSD I realized everything I helped build was on a

3/ web of lies with the hope members of the Autopilot team would silently pick up the slack before the public or others realized how bad it was.

Here’s a couple examples of safety concerns out of dozens I could choose:

The industry labels objects using Lidar, Radar & Camera

4/ You rely on Lidar for practically all labeling.

Lidar = Ground Truth

Without Lidar, it’s the Wild West of guessing where an object is in the Camera.

Alternatively, Radar can give off 1 data point (i.e this dot is the closest part of a large object to you) does not work

5/ for groups of people. It can only tell you the rough location of the group.

Tesla had issues with VRUs (Vulnerable Road Users) so mngmt had us use customer data with VRUs in Camera instead of Ground Truth Machine Data.

Customer data does not have Lidar. Only Camera & Radar.

6/ It made it impossible to label accurately! We had to guess object placement based on intuition.

Normal data we labeled also did not have cameras that lined up or were calibrated.

Ex: You’d place what appears to be a perfect label of a truck in the front camera

7/ however it will appear floating & misaligned in the side camera.

Don’t even get me started on the camera blind spots!

For months I went back and forth between family / friends if I should leave Tesla due to their horrid working environment and their safety culture

8/ until a medical professional mandated that I was placed on a 3 month medical leave caused by Tesla.

While on medical leave I received an internal job transfer. Five days after returning from medical leave, Tesla HR asked me to stop showing up as they “messed up” my transfer

9/ documents. My badge locked me out of the building hours before HR would reach out to explain the issue at hand. I was assured I wasn’t singled out, as HR claimed its a normal thing and has already happened to hundreds of other Employees in Jan 2022 as well.

It took

10/ approximately 6 weeks of utter stress to resolve the issue with HR. The 6 weeks were unpaid.

Within 24 hours of returning again to Tesla I was fired for making Safety Concerns available to the public

I continue to heavily believe in #Tesla and I love their products, but..

11/ I do not love my old department.

Autopilot / FSD do incredible things & I’m honored to have been apart of such an incredible team of bright minded individuals. I have faith in Tesla to pick up the pieces and deliver a finished product one day. Autopilot has helped me a lot

12/ in life. I just wish there was more transparency around Tesla’s claims about Autopilot’s capability / how they train the system vs. how the publicly available product performs in customer hands.

There should also be more transparency on how they treat employees.