As a child-size mannequin stands in a traffic lane on a rural two-lane road, a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode barrels toward it. And the car drives on, as if nothing happened. It's the latest salvo from activist organization the Dawn Project, which publishes videos aimed at showing how badly Tesla's automated driving technology can behave. Dan O'Dowd, the wealthy, tech-savvy activist who founded and self-funds the Dawn Project, said he wants to ensure that "the safety-critical systems that everyone's life depends on are fail-safe and can't be hacked." While O'Dowd's stated goal is brand-agnostic, his main target since launching the Dawn Project in 2021 has been Tesla and its controversial Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems.

A California billionaire has ramped up attacks on Tesla by running a Super Bowl ad questioning the safety of the car maker's self-driving technology. The 30-second commercial shows the electric cars crashing into child-sized mannequins, driving past a stopped school bus and hitting strollers in a parking lot while a narrator proclaims that "Tesla's full self-driving is endangering the public." The ad is the latest in what has been a yearlong campaign by tech executive Dan O'Dowd to have Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology, or FSD, barred from the roads and push lawmakers to increase scrutiny of the technology's safety. Dowd founded a campaign dubbed the Dawn Project to speak out against Tesla, and bugs and security defects in other computer systems. The organization has run a full-page ad in the New York Times and posted similar videos online, but the newest video ran during one of the nation's most watched sporting events, in which a 30-second commercial was reported to cost $6 million to $7 million.

Just as Twitter starts banning accounts that impersonate its new owner Elon Musk, it seems the social media platform is also rejecting ads that criticize the Chief Twit's Tesla. The Dawn Project, an anti-Tesla advocacy group, recently took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that claims the carmaker's Full Self-Driving system'presents a life-threatening danger to child pedestrians.' The group attempted to promote the ad on Twitter, but received a notification that it was not approved due to being'political.' However, its founder posted the advertisement to his account and it has yet to be taken down. The advertisement discusses testing conducted by the group in October, which claims to show the system does not register or stop for small mannequins crossing a road.

As if Elon Musk did not have enough on his plate with Twitter, Tesla is now under fire in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that warns its'Full Self-Driving presents a life-threatening danger to child pedestrians.' The ad, which cost about $150,000, is from software maker The Dawn Project and claims to highlight safety testing conducted by the firm in October. A video of the experiment suggests the system does not register or stop for small mannequins crossing a road, according to the group. The testing involved a man driving in a Tesla on a back road and running over child-size mannequins in his path. Using the Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta 10.69.2.2, which is the latest version of the system, the vehicle collided with a 29-inch mannequin at speeds as low as 15 miles per hour and it ran over a four-foot-tall one at 20 miles per hour.

A safe-technology advocacy group issued claims Tuesday that Tesla's full self-driving software represents a potentially lethal threat to child pedestrians, the latest in a series of claims and investigations into the technology to hit the world's leading electric carmaker. According to a safety test conducted by the Dawn Project, the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software repeatedly hit a stationary, child-sized mannequin in its path. The claims that the technology apparently has trouble recognizing children form part of an ad campaign urging the public to pressure Congress to ban Tesla's auto-driving technology. In several tests, a professional test driver found that the software – released in June – failed to detect the child-sized figure at an average speed of 25mph and the car then hit the mannequin. The Dawn Project' founder, Dan O'Dowd, called the results "deeply disturbing."

A'deeply disturbing' video claims to show a Tesla in full self-driving mode running over a child-size mannequin during a test by a safety campaign group. The Dawn Project said the vehicle failed to detect the stationary dummy's presence in the road and hit it over and over again at an average speed of 25mph. It claims that the experiment was carried out under'controlled conditions' on a test track in California. Tesla, which was founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has been approached for a comment by MailOnline but is yet to respond to the video. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) confirmed that it'currently has an open and active investigation of Tesla's Autopilot active driver assistance system'.

A full page advertisement in Sunday's New York Times took aim at Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" software, calling it "the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company" and offering $10,000, the same price as the software itself to the first person who could name "another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes." The ad was taken out by The Dawn Project, a recently founded organization aiming to ban unsafe software from safety critical systems that can be targeted by military-style hackers, as part of a campaign to remove Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) from public roads until it has "1,000 times fewer critical malfunctions." The founder of the advocacy group, Dan O'Dowd, is also the CEO of Green Hill Software, a company that builds operating systems and programming tools for embedded safety and security systems. At CES, the company said BMW's iX vehicle is using its real-time OS and other safety software, and it also announced the availability of its new over-the-air software product and data services for automotive electronic systems. Despite the potential competitive bias of The Dawn Project's founder, Tesla's FSD beta software, an advanced driver assistance system that Tesla owners can access to handle some driving function on city streets, has come under scrutiny in recent months after a series of YouTube videos that showed flaws in the system went viral.

Matei Zaharia has been an instrumental figure in the world of distributed computing and big data over the past decade, helping create Apache Mesos and Apache Spark, and then co-founding Spark-based startup Databricks, where he's still CTO. Now a Stanford professor, as well, Zaharia is working with colleagues Peter Bailis, Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré on a new project called DAWN, which aims to make it easier for everyone to take advantage of artificial intelligence. In this episode of the ARCHITECHT Show podcast, Zahara and Bailis talk about what DAWN is, the projects it includes and the specific problems they're trying to solve. The interview touches on a number of issues related to AI and machine learning, including: the difficulty of obtaining quality data (and people) to train AI models; how AI can build on the lessons and technologies of the big data era; the importance of building end-to-end systems; the differences between doing AI on the web versus in a field like health care; and why academia and open source are great places to tackle tough challenges. This week's episode brought to you by: In the news segment, co-host and Barb Darrow (Fortune) and I talk all about Amazon, and how its $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods is having competitive repercussions even in its cloud business.