According to a post on X, Elon Musk said that Tesla has yet to unlock the full potential of AI4 – the now-renamed Hardware 4.
HW4 / AI4
AI4 currently runs Hardware 3 in emulation mode, which means it's only running about as fast as Hardware 3 can run. With just basic specs in mind, AI4’s cameras have 4-5x better overall resolution and fidelity than Hardware 3 and should be about 3-5x faster in inference capabilities. That’s a considerable increase over the baseline specs of Hardware 3.
With FSD 12.5, AI4 is running a FSD model that has a 5x increase in parameters, resulting in a smoother driving experience. Recently, Elon Musk noted that AI4 should be able to provide an additional 8x time increase in parameters. While we’re not exactly sure how the parameter metric computes vs the inference capability metric, but if we add them, it’s a 12x increase in capability.
However, Elon’s post implies that this is an 8x increase over the capacity they originally thought to have – nearly 50x faster than Hardware 3. That’s a bold claim, but could entirely be based on software optimization and not having to run Hardware 3 in emulation mode in the future, once AI4 and Hardware 3 begin to diverge.
AI4 Divergence
Divergence is still expected to be a few months away – at least not until early 2025. However, Elon confirmed that the new Supercomputer Cluster, which will run AI4 alongside Nvidia GPUs, is coming online very soon. This means that work on improving FSD with the newly unlocked potential of AI4 is going to start soon – however, it may not necessarily come to customers right away.
FSD on Hardware 3
Currently, most of Tesla’s fleet is still on Hardware 3 – the Model 3 only changed over after the refresh, and the Model Y only changed over in late 2023. Even if AI4 brings drastic improvements, Tesla will still have to focus a lot of energy on optimizing their model so that Hardware 3 vehicles – some of which are less than a year old today, can still run the latest FSD updates.
Musk recently commented on X that Tesla is still optimizing FSD to run on hardware 3. He originally estimated that it would take about 10 days to optimize the code for HW 3, however, that date has come and gone. We’re now on day 15, and HW 3 owners are getting increasingly frustrated about the delay and the worry that HW 3 is reaching its limits.
FSD v12.5.1.3 is currently the latest FSD version available to the public. However, Musk said that this version doesn’t have HW 3 support yet, and it’ll be a new unreleased version that will roll out for HW 3.
Team is working on it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2024
This will be a different release number.
