As someone who also purchased FSD, I was able to drive hundreds of kilometers without any disengagements even though my car is an older HW3 with 12.6. I fully believe that with some Waymo-like conservative route planning and teleoperator backup, they will be able to achieve their robotaxi goals this year.
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.
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.
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)".)
