Elon Musk indicates that Tesla FSD Version 11 will go to wide release in December, 2022 for anyone who purchased FSD in the US.
This would likely mean that at the Jan 20th, 2023 earnings call they should recognize all of the deferred revenue. 50% of the FSD price was deferred until all features were available.
By “wide release next month” do you mean to those who currently have beta or to anyone who purchased FSD who won’t have to do safety score.
— Zack (@BLKMDL3) November 21, 2022
Tesla has also placed a large order with Taiwan Semiconductor for more advanced chips (4 nanometer or so) for more advanced hardware 4 for full self driving. Hardware 4 should enable FSD to be over 10 times safer than average human drivers versus up three or four times safer with Hardware 3.
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It seems to me it is becoming obvious that general intelligence is the big elephant in the room for any further improvement in autonomy whether driving or other uses. Simply being reactive to the environment without anticipating the real world dynamics (which seems to be the primary mode of most self drive systems) only gets you so far. Tesla and other other systems work surprisingly well until the outlier situations happen.
It is not surprising that Elon decided to work on Optimus as solving general environmental navigation solves for both. At this point Optimus looks closer and mistakes less deadly as the uses are inherently localized and can be limited. A good level of general intelligence would overcome many if not all shortcomings of data collection. Whatever tech is involved cameras, Lidar or Radar, unless the data is contextualized with knowledge of the environment, including understanding of other drivers behaviour, there will always be situations that require general knowledge to make a decision.
Perhaps not insurmountable but orders of magnitude more complex than anticipated. Lookout when this is solved though,things will move fast in multiple areas of autonomy.
According to Gartner, autonomous vehicles are now in the Trough of Disillusionment and will not become mainstream before 10-15 years.
“In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you’re in LA and the car is in NY”
Elon Musk Tweet Jan 10, 2016
“It’s financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,”
“It would be like owning a horse in three years. I mean, fine if you want to own a horse. But you should go into it with that expectation.”
“Tesla will have robotaxis on the roads by 2020”
Elon Musk Tesla Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto 2019
Musk has already made outlandish claims about FSD in the past. So far his track record on the subject is not amazing.
Brian, while I understand that you might like his work at SpaceX, at the moment, Teslas are just nice cars. The autopilot function is not even remotely capable of handling the road on its own. And while people will reply that it is not supposed to work as autopilot but just as a tool to assist drivers, this is the idea that Musk continued (and continues) to sell.
So if v11 is released to all purchasers in December 2022, Elon would have been off by as much as 4 years in predicting when Tesla achieves a technology that’s transformative to the global economy.
Similar to his predictions about SpaceX making humanity genuinely spacefaring for the first time if Starship launches in December.
That may certainly would seem like a long delay to customers who paid for FSD years ago and didn’t get access but it won’t seem like much to history.
There are an awful lot of if’s in your thinking but if Tesla delivers this then they are years ahead of the competition.
(Note the presence of my own “if”)
Why is updating hardware going to increase safety? I can understand why software updates can have a huge increase in safety profiles but increasing already powerful hardware is unlikely to make a significant difference.
If the upgrade increases the speed of the chip, that probably could allow the self-driving decisions to be made faster, reducing reaction time. Or maybe a faster chip would allow for more thorough analysis to be done in the same reaction time, possibly leading to better decisions. Either of those probably would improve safety.
If the more advanced chips are providing some new capability other than higher speed, without knowing what the new capability is, I would not hazard a guess about how that might improve safety.
The new hardware will allow the simulation of a larger, perhaps with more layers, and thus “smarter” neural network. Presumably more simulated neurons, configured properly will result in better decisions.