Tesla announces Level 5 Autonomy, Zero-sum game!

Elon Musk announced yesterday to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai that Tesla are on the cusp of completing level 5 Autonomous driving. Back in 2018 I recognized that there was a 2 year window and a race to get to this stage, by NVIDIA, VW, GM and other Chinese automaker upstarts. Even I was a part of that race organizing partnerships with Baidu and other small intelligent tech firms to work in tandem to solve the gap at the time. Here we are, in 2020 and the 24 month window has finally come to a close and Tesla has revealed itself as the potential winner of Level 5 Autonomy.

This also reveals a more important crossroad. If indeed Tesla has cracked the code automakers will be looking in and considering, if they should continue their own independent developments, or if they should concede and propose licensing the technology. It would be an upstream struggle for the other car makers to continue developing the technology, and whilst they teeter on realising Level 5 Autonomy, Tesla would be basking in the sales of already capable vehicles. I mentioned in a previous post that as humans we would all benefit from an open source platform that wasn’t dominated by one company. Yet even though Tesla is a public company with it’s own particular goals and visions I can imagine that there will be a great potential for open source participation, but of course with a licensing fee suffered by the end consumer.

The idea that Tesla is on the brink of Level 5 autonomy also is an existential threat…