It may be flying under the radar for many, but Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology is making massive strides at a breakneck pace. If Elon Musk’s latest tweets are any indication, Tesla’s FSD revolution is ramping up rapidly on multiple fronts.
Leading the upcoming AI driver assists overhaul is the FSD v12.4, release has “almost completely retrained models” under the hood with optimizations for smooth, reassuring driving dynamics.
“The final touches are for comfort, as it sometimes accelerates or brakes too fast for most people’s taste,” Elon explained regarding the FSD v12.4 tweaks.
12.4 has almost completely retrained models. The final touches are for comfort, as it sometimes accelerates or brakes too fast for most people’s taste.
12.5 and 12.6 are in various stages of testing. We’re getting into rare, complex situations, for example: going down a narrow,…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 8, 2024
Re-trained brain extends well beyond just polishing driving feel, Elon says FSD v12.5 and v12.6 are concurrently tackling increasingly rare, complex scenarios like navigating narrow one-way roads, encountering closures that require rerouting, and rapidly sharing that road data across Tesla’s entire fleet.
Public BETA Test on a Gargantuan Scale
Speaking of Tesla’s entire fleet, wrapped up an unprecedented field test by offering 1.8 million owners a free 30-day FSD trial with the v12 update. That audacious beta has already paid dividends by allowing Tesla’s neural nets to hoover up a staggering 1 billion miles worth of real-world FSD data every 2-3 months.
For context, Musk notes it previously took around 3 years for the company’s fleet to accumulate 1 billion miles of FSD real-world miles. That’s an enormous increase in training data influx, and we’re already seeing the benefits trickle down to the v12.x releases.
Hitting the Compute Accelerator
Tesla’s FSD team isn’t just leveling up their AI models – Tesla is turbocharging the immense computing hardware powering those neural nets. Elon reveals that after years of being “compute constrained,” Tesla is finally lifting that limitation with at least a 6x increase in training compute capacity coming.
More raw compute muscle translates directly to accelerating the rate of Tesla’s FSD capability improvements.
The AI advancements and beefed up hardware seem to be paying dividends beyond just furious development iterations. Tesla has already secured preliminary approval to roll out Tesla FSD (Supervised) in China soon.
A Massive Moment for Autonomy
All these developments represent what Elon calls a “massive moment”, from paradigm-shifting updates like the FSD v12.4 supervised release to unprecedented AI training data influxes and key regulatory milestones, finally be getting rid of the FSD steering wheel nag with FSD, all the pieces seem to be falling into place.
Of course, the road to full automotive autonomy remains long and arduous, if Tesla’s torrid pace of FSD progress continues on this accelerated trajectory, they could be reaching that autonomous promised land sooner than anyone expects.