Tesla is finally wide-releasing Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised v13 to vehicles with Hardware 4 computers. CEO Elon Musk commented on the release with a familiar comment: “Your mind will be blown,” again.
The highly anticipated FSD v13 update was October’s main goal in Tesla’s new monthly AI roadmaps, which it gave up on after 2 months because it missed too many goals, including v13, which slipped into the November roadmap.
Tesla ended up pushing v13.1 to a limited number of vehicles in the last few hours of November, but it was a dumb downed version without some of the major improvements that were announced in the product roadmap.
Now, with FSD v13.2.1, Tesla has announced that it was wide releasing the update to customers with vehicles equipped with its HW4 (AI4) computer. Tesla’s head of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, commented on the release:
FSD v13.2.1 is now rolling out wide to AI4 customers! That plus the holiday vehicle software update is coming within a week. Team’s working on a much updated v12.6 for AI3 customers by end of this year.
Despite Musk saying last year that Tesla drivers with the older HW3 computer would get updates 6 months in advance of HW4 owners because they have been waiting longer, Tesla has reserved its plan and now HW3 owners are not getting the same capabilities as HW4 owners.
Electrek reported that Tesla is reaching the limits of its HW3 computer despite being nowhere near unsupervised self-driving capabilities.
Elluswamy now says that HW3 owners can now expect “a much updated v12.6.”
Top comment by CMG30
The problem with Elon's pay package is that it incentivizes the wrong things. It's almost exclusivly weighted towards stock options so Elon's incentive is to pump the stock at every turn. For a while, this meant actually delivering cars. Now the stock is maxed out as far as an automaker can go in terms of stock price.
So how to keep juicing the stock? Well, another 'mind blowing' FSD update announcement ought to keep things pointed north for a few weeks. Maybe he'll have Tesla pivot to being an "AI" company. Maybe there will be a dancing robot. Maybe they'll announce a new roadster that never needs to be made. etc. etc. etc.
Musk also commented on the update, saying that it will “blow your mind”, but it’s literally something that he said about every new Tesla FSD update:
Tesla FSD has made improvements over the last few years, but it is still far from being capable of achieving unsupervised self-driving – something that Musk claimed Tesla would achieve every year for the last 5 years.
Electrek’s Take
I am looking forward to trying v13, and as I said before, I believe it will result in a significant improvement in miles between disengagement, but less so now that it doesn’t include a three times improvement in model size scaling and model context length scaling.
Right now, the usual Tesla influencers are all raving about it and saying all the same things they say with every new version, much like Elon, but it’s hard to give them much credibility about this, like Elon.
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