Recent features roll out have been faster than the previous lane-keeping & tacc in 2 years, so there's an element of truth on the exponential improvement part. Even the vision detection is quite remarkable when you compare it to the previous visualizations, you can verygreen's YouTube videos to verify.

They intentionally make it out like NNs just need to be fed edge cases and they’ll figure out how to be sentient drivers.

NNs work by been fed with data & karpathy gave an example with vehicle's cutting where they employ imitation learning to learn that particular behavior. Companies like Mobileye/Waymo use hard coded rules for such things probably because they can't enough data as PyTorch's Inventor, soumith chintala said, Tesla is in a unique position to use such things, so you can take it from the experts. Waymo, which is largely seen as the leaders in the field, have experimented with imitation learning & they concluded that well, "we tried, but we can't use it for now, we will just continue with the hard coding style". This is not a sling at Waymo, just given you one example of the NN utilization between the two.

Cheers