Tesla finally confirms the rollout of FSD 12.5 for Hardware 3 (HW3)/AI3 vehicles. The automaker’s Head of Autopilot AI Aashok Elluswamy took to X (Twitter) to confirm the rollout of the FSD v12.5.1.4 (firmware version 2024.26.15) OTA software update for HW3 cars.
According to a report by NotATeslaApp, the 2024.26.15 or FSD v12.5.1.4 update is currently rolled out only to Tesla employees on the FSD Supervised early access beta-testing team.
HW3 Tesla vehicles still make up the majority of Tesla vehicles on the roads globally. Tesla is currently publicly testing its Full Self-Driving Supervised (formerly FSD Beta) in the US and Canada only (due to regulatory limitations).
Tesla Hardware 4 vehicles only went into production in May last year (2023). Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk renamed the Hardware 4 computer to AI4 (Artificial Intelligence 4).
So, Tesla is currently testing FSD v12.5 point release v12.5.1.4 internally. This is the next version after v12.5.1.3 which rolled out around mid-August and beta testers shared their experiences of it which were mostly good.
After thorough internal testing, Tesla is expected to roll out FSD v12.5.1.4 to external beta testers driving on HW3 cars before making it a wide release for the legacy Autopilot AI3 vehicles. This would take anywhere from a week to a few weeks.
Sometimes, the internal testing version of FSD Supervised is never released for non-employee cars. If there are bugs and issues in this version, Tesla might deploy FSD v12.5 in a later point release to the pool of external testers.
FSD v12.5 for HW3 Confirmation, Technical Hurdles, and Limitations
Ashok Elluswamy took to X (his boss Elon Musk’s social media platform) to confirm the rollout of FSD v12.5.1.4 for HW3 vehicles. He also gave a technical explanation of how the Tesla AI software team made it possible to run FSD v12.5 on Hardware 3 (HW3).
The thing to keep in mind is that HW3 is significantly inferior in processing power compared to HW4. The good news is, Tesla successfully ran FSD v12.5 on the HW3/AI3 computer. The bad news is that they had to reduce the software model to achieve this goal. Elon Musk said last month that Tesla needs to optimize the FSD v12.5 code to run it on HW3 vehicles.
Although the performance of both HW4 (AI4) and HW3 (AI3) is similar in this instance according to Ashok, I think it will be difficult for the Tesla team to maintain the same in future releases as the neural net and software processing becomes even more complex. This is the worst fear of HW3 Tesla vehicle owners, as Tesla progresses toward a fully autonomous Full Self-Driving software. HW3 cars will become a legacy with time as the automaker has already announced the next-gen AI5 chip for its Robotaxi platform.
Ashok wrote on X (Twitter):
We were able to achieve similar performance as the AI4 12.5 release with a relatively smaller model for AI3. Deploying the larger model requires us to implement a few kernels in the compiler to emulate the same operations that are natively supported on the AI4 hardware. The team is actively working on implementing and verifying those operations. Combined with other model compression techniques, we think we can run the same 12.5 model on both the hardware platforms in the future.
That said, model parameter count is just one of the many axes of performance improvement. Dataset distribution, dataset quality, model architecture, training compute, etc., also have tremendous impact on the final performance.
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Related Autopilot/FSD News
- Tesla Actually Smart Summon to go wide release next week, says Elon Musk
- Tesla rolls out the Actually Smart Summon (ASS) feature with FSD 12.5.3 (2024.27.20) update (Release Notes)
- Tesla FSD v12.5 tested on HW3 Model S, performance comparison to HW4 (video)
- Tesla rolls out FSD 12.5.1.5 to HW3 customer cars, read first impressions by early tester
- Tesla confirms FSD 12.5 support for HW3 cars in the 2024.26.15 update
- Cybertruck expected to get FSD in September, Tesla rolls out the Summer Update 2024.26.7 to Cybertrucks
 rolls out FSD v12.5 for HW3 cars in the point release v12.5.1.4 (2024.26.15). It's currently under testing by employees. Tesla AI head explains technical stuff.){kind=link}
I received update 2024.26.20 this morning and it includes FSD 12.5.1.5. My Tesla is a M3 RWD with HW3.
Congrats. Yep, posted the rollout update and early tester’s first impressions in the next post here: https://www.teslaoracle.com/2024/08/23/tesla-rolls-out-fsd-12-5-to-hw3-for-customers-read-first-impressions-by-early-tester/
Do let us know your experience in the comments on the new update article. Thx!