Self Driving Evolves
Tesla has finally started to release v12 of its Full Self Driving software to customers after a localization delay forced the company to hold the update back in December.
Version 12 is particularly important to Tesla’s navigation software, as it is set to introduce the “end-to-end neural nets” that CEO Elon Musk has been hyping since last March.
As Tesla puts it in their release notes:
“FSD Beta v12 upgrades the city-streets driving stack to a single end-to-end neural network trained on millions of video clips, replacing over 300k lines of explicit C++ code.”
This is the huge change presented at AI Day, where the original method of training Tesla’s self driving software - which was a more traditionally coded framework of explicit rules - will be replaced by a network of cars, sharing video clips of road conditions, and training each other how to drive using learning algorithms.
It represents a huge step towards actual automatic driving - as well as showcases some powerful new company tech - like the Dojo supercomputers that run the training algorithms.
This version of FSD has been used in Tesla’s internal testing groups for some time now - leading to the update performing well on California roads by the time it was originally supposed to ship back in Decemeber - but recognizing that there were some difficulties with the system being used in areas with higher amounts of precipitation just as Winter was really setting in - the company wisely chose to wait a month in order to train their neural nets on how to drive in slippery conditions.
And as more drivers start to get their hands on this version of the beta, the collective network of vehicles with this update will only improve their ability to handle road conditions - which is entirely the point of using a learning algorithm paired with the visual systems of each Tesla vehicle.
However this is an absolutely gigantic change to the FSD system, and aside from the new network needing some time to learn, there will likely also be the usual glitches and mistakes that come with any new software release.
Hopefully with a system that learns constantly as drivers upload data to each other and Tesla’s servers, it won’t be long until this version of FSD shows its full potential.