The news: Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions--and getting answers back thanks to a chatbot. How it works: The idea is to use the same tech behind ChatGPT to help train driverless cars. The company combined its existing self-driving software with a large language model, creating a hybrid model that syncs up video data and driving data with natural-language descriptions that capture what the car sees and what it does. Why it matters: Wayve is treating the news as a breakthrough in AI safety. By quizzing its self-driving software every step of the way, Wayve hopes to understand exactly why and how its cars make certain decisions--and to uncover mistakes more quickly.

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.

Tesla is getting ready to roll out a software upgrade that will allow a select few drivers to use more autonomous driving features in cities. Up to now, the beta versions of driver assistance software made available to thousands of drivers in the US have been designed for the relatively more simple environment of highways. Computer-assisted urban driving would bring Tesla a step closer to CEO Elon Musk's vision of fully self-driving vehicles. But safety officials think the company is getting ahead of itself, and putting drivers at risk. "Basic safety issues have to be addressed before they're then expanding it to other city streets and other areas," Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency that investigates transportation accidents, said in a Sept. 19 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Tesla has unveiled its new supercomputer, which is already the fifth most powerful in the world, and it's going to be the predecessor of Tesla's upcoming new Dojo supercomputer. It is being used to train the neural nets powering Tesla's Autopilot and upcoming self-driving AI. Over the last few years, Tesla has had a clear focus on computing power both inside and outside its vehicles. Inside, it needs computers powerful enough to run its self-driving software, and outside, it needs supercomputers to train its self-driving software powered by neural nets that are fed an insane amount of data coming from the fleet. CEO Elon Musk has been teasing Tesla's Dojo project, which apparently consists of a supercomputer capable of an exaFLOP, one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS – making it one of the most powerful computers in the world.

Self-driving cars are as fascinating as they are challenging to develop. The sensors, compute, actuation all need to continuously work together to understand the surrounding environment and respond in real-time. And when it all works as expected, we will save lives and change society for the better. Back in 2013, Tesla, while still struggling, decided to take on this challenge. All in the midst of posting huge operating losses, struggling to manufacture cars and scale production. What was Tesla's strategy, and why? How has it evolved over the years?

Tesla has acquired a small artificial intelligence startup called DeepScale in order to help build its self-driving technology and reach its goal of building a giant fleet of robotaxis. CNBC is reporting that Tesla has acquired DeepScale, a Bay Area-based startup that focuses on "Deep Neural Network (DNN)". DeepScale CEO Forrest Iandola confirmed on LinkedIn that he joined Tesla as a "senior staff machine learning scientist": "I joined the Tesla #Autopilot team this week. I am looking forward to working with some of the brightest minds in #deeplearning and #autonomousdriving." Furthermore, the publication says that two additional sources confirmed that DeepScale was acquired by Tesla and its small team will be joining the automaker.

No one wants to be hurt because they're inadvertently driving next to an unproven self-driving vehicle. However, the costs of validating self-driving vehicles on the roads are extraordinary. To mitigate this, most autonomous developers test their systems in simulation, that is, in virtual environments. Starsky uses limited low-fidelity simulation to gauge the effects of certain system inputs on truck behavior. Simulation helps us to learn the proper force an actuator should exert on a steering mechanism, to achieve a turn of the desired radius.

A new video shows Tesla's full self-driving technology out in the wild. In the nearly two-minute clip, a Tesla can be seen stopping at intersections, driving down highways and suburban roads, navigating exit ramps and changing lanes, all without the driver ever touching the wheel. The vehicle travels at about 45 miles per hour on average throughout the clip and is even able to put itself in park when it finishes navigating the route. The video comes after Elon Musk on Monday talked up Tesla's progress in bringing fully autonomous vehicles to the masses at the company's Autonomy Day. According to Musk, every Tesla has the hardware necessary to carry out full self-driving like what is shown in the video.

The media circus around driverless cars and their safety and ease of use could be distracting us from a more realistic technology -- driverless buses. These are already running in several locations. In California, a bus made by French company EasyMile is due to come into public service in the next year. There have already been several demonstration runs in Canada. At London Heathrow, four-person driverless pods have been shuttling passengers between Terminal 5 and a car park since 2011, which in driverless technology terms is practically the Jurassic age.

Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to share more news about the company's self-driving technology. According to the entrepreneur, plans are in place to make the autonomous software found in Tesla units available on open-source platforms. Thanks for helping make Tesla & SpaceX more secure! Musk has often noted growing concerns over hackers getting access to Tesla's softwares. He has said that preventing a large-scale hack is one of Tesla's biggest security priorities.