In the past 24-48 hours Tesla has been rolling out their latest FSD Beta Software, version 12.3. From the posts and videos shared by FSD Beta testers, the new release has widely been regarded as a significant improvement over previous builds.
The software is still in development and still isn’t perfect, but is behaving in the most human-link way we’ve seen so far. Elon Musk had indicated that there’s so much new in this release that it could have been called version 13, with major software build numbers typically reserved for functionality milestones.
Musk’s view of the world is one data point, but it’s posts from the Director of Tesla’s Autopilot team that is perhaps the most promising on the technology.
Ashok Elluswamy confirms that they believe FSD Beta V12 has now surpassed the V11 stack, which supports why we’re seeing waves of deployments and many users across the US and Canada posting that their car is receiving the over-the-air update.
For many, build 2023.4430.25 will be their first release on the new end-to-end V12 approach, taking video in and controls out. The way the system is learning and resolving edge cases, is for it to be shown video examples of correct driving behaviour given the specific scenario. The model is then improved and a new software release is created, validated internally, and then shipped to customers.
Perhaps the most bullish comment from Elluswamy is the latest reply.. saying
‘the next set of 12.x releases should bring unprecedented progress.’
Ashok Elluswamy, Director Autopilot Software at Tesla
Gone are the days when humans are hand labelling data and writing heuristic code to determine the best course of action. Processing large slabs of video training data is of course very compute-intensive, something Musk had previously confirmed was a challenge for the company.
Today he posted that their constraint in training compute is much improved. Musk had indicated that the combination of their own Dojo chips, along with large quantities of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs was the solution. It seems the close to $2 billion investment is coming online and starting to yield benefits.
If training compute at Tesla is finally under control, the question becomes, how fast can they find problems and fix them, and how many problems are there on the to-do list? Could Tesla finally increase the cadence of software releases and improvements and bring improved reliability and functionality to FSD customers and subscribers across the globe in 2024?
FSD Beta Timeline
Below is history of the major FSD Beta releases which so far are only available to consumers in the North America and Canada, while a firm timeline for release into other markets like Australia remains unknown.
- Early Access Program (late 2020): Limited rollout to select Tesla owners
- v10.2 (2021): Introduced the Tesla Vision system (reliance on cameras instead of radar)
- v10.12 (2022): Significant improvements in unprotected left turns, object detection
- v11 (Late 2022): ‘Single stack’ update – merging highway and city driving software
- v12 (March 2024): Neural-net based approach for better decision making
FSD Beta V12 videos
I have and always will recommend your FSD Beta diet consists of a diverse range of video sources. Here’s a few V12.3 hands-on videos that I recommend you watch.
