Tesla Is Looking to Hire a Team to Remotely Control Its ‘Self-Driving’ Robotaxis

Elon Musk has promised that his EV institution Tesla volition rotation retired “fully autonomous” vehicles successful the adjacent fewer years. Musk precocious unveiled what helium called the “Cybercab” and said that Tesla plans to motorboat a robotaxi work by 2026, competing with different big-name brands presently operating successful the space. However, “fully autonomous,” arsenic Musk has utilized it, mightiness beryllium a spot of a misnomer. Recent reports amusement the institution is readying to prosecute a quality squad to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.

A precocious spotted Tesla occupation listing advertises a relation to physique retired a distant teleoperations squad for the firm’s upcoming robotaxi fleet. “Tesla AI’s Teleoperation squad is charged with providing distant entree to our robotaxis and humanoid robots,” the listing notes, highlighting an further request to assistance Musk’s nascent line of Tesla robots. “Our cars and robots run autonomously successful challenging environments. As we iterate connected the AI that powers them, we request the quality to entree and power them remotely,” the listing states.

The occupation station besides notes that specified a teleoperation halfway requires “building highly optimized debased latency reliable information streaming implicit unreliable transports successful the existent world.” Tele-operators tin beryllium “transported” into the robotaxi via a “state-of-the-art VR rig,” it adds.

Tesla would not beryllium the archetypal robotaxi institution to usage this method. In fact, it’s an manufacture standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi institution owned by General Motors, was employing distant quality assistants to troubleshoot erstwhile its vehicles ran into occupation (the vehicles look to person tally into occupation each 4 to 5 miles). Google’s Waymo is besides thought to employ the aforesaid practice, arsenic does Zoox, the robotaxi steadfast owned by Amazon.

In general, specified methods look to beryllium portion of a broader inclination successful which companies marketplace their products arsenic “autonomous” oregon AI-powered, lone to aboriginal uncover that overmuch of the enactment that the merchandise does is really performed by low-wage quality contractors. Last twelvemonth it was reported that immoderate of the pivotal enactment down ChatGPT, OpenAI’s prized chatbot, was powered by quality workers who were lone being paid $15 per hour.

Silicon Valley wants america to judge that their autonomous products are a benignant of self-guided magic, but the exertion is intelligibly not determination yet. A speedy highest down the curtain has consistently revealed a merchandise basal that, astatine a minimum, is inactive profoundly reliant connected quality workforces.