Tesla AI Praised By Elon Musk, Challenged By Ex-Employee's Autopilot Safety Concerns

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. TSLA, has publicly lauded the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within his company, asserting, "Tesla has by far the best real-world AI."

What Happened: On Saturday, Musk announced this in a post on X platform. However, his endorsement faces skepticism from a former Tesla employee, Lukasz Krupski.

In an interview with BBC News, Krupski expressed apprehensions regarding the utilization of AI in Tesla's Autopilot feature. He also questioned the readiness of Tesla's self-driving technology for integration into their vehicles, stating, "It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads."

Krupski first came into the spotlight earlier this year when he blew the whistle, leaking around 100 gigabytes of confidential Tesla data to The Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, back in May.

This data reportedly contained approximately 4,000 recorded customer complaints related to Tesla's driver assistance program.

Tesla's response to Krupski's allegations came through their legal counsel, who labeled Krupski as a "disgruntled former employee."

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The attorney alleged that Krupski had misused his position to disseminate sensitive material. Some of the leaked documents provided insight into accidents that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot feature, initially introduced in 2015, was in operation.

Tesla's Autopilot represents an advanced driver-assistance system, employing cameras for traffic monitoring and limited driving task automation, always under human supervision.

The leaked data also revealed thousands of customer complaints, including reports of "phantom braking" and sudden accelerations.

The investigative report by The Handelsblatt, spanning from 2015 to 2022, unearthed a minimum of 2,400 documented customer complaints regarding sudden acceleration of Tesla vehicles, 1,500 complaints concerning emergency braking due to a malfunctioning collision warning signal, and 1,000 reported accidents.

Krupski, who had previously raised safety concerns while working in Oslo, Norway, stated that he faced harassment and eventual termination as a consequence. In an interview with The New York Times in November, he revealed that the past few months had been marked by terror and sleepless nights, largely stemming from the fallout of the data leak.

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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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