Tesla is rolling out FSD (Full Self Driving) version 13 this weekend to Tesla employees. This includes a fleet of Tesla cars being used to give Waymo-Uber like ridehailing to Tesla employees.
I make the case that FSD Version 13 and the systems that follow next year will give Tesla a 5-10 year lead. The car company and Waymo competitors in China are currently buying Nvidia Orin and Thor driving chips and software. The Nvidia driving chips are just the base system and the companies still have to train them to create their driving automation AI.
IF Tesla has a 5-10 year lead then the obvious choice to catch up with a system that is 600 times better than the Ford, Xpeng, Huawei, BYD or other driving systems is to license FSD from Tesla.
FSD Hardware AI4 Chip is Needed for Robotaxi
The FSD Hardware 4 computer uses a custom System on a Chip (SoC) called “FSD Computer”. Tesla has been trying to use the Hardware 3 chip for robotaxi capability but will likely have to replace it. Tesla said they would replace it for free.
Catching up to Where Tesla Was at the End of 2023
Tesla had the AI4 chips installed in 5 million cars at the end of 2023.
This cost about $10 billion for the chip and camera hardware alone.
This was $200 billion worth of cars which customers paid and Tesla made profits.
All other car companies sell electric cars for a loss.
Spent years developing up to FSD version 11.
Tesla had to convert to end to end neural net in 2023.
Tesla had to unify city driving and highway.
Tesla still needed 2 billion miles of driving data in 2024.
Tesla created superior testing and simulation systems.
Tesla automated labeling so no human labelers were needed.
They mostly automatically identify all of the learning cases.
They pull gigabytes of data each car from every day. Hundreds of petabytes.
They have proper scoring of the quality and safety of human drivers. The AI then copies the best human drivers.
The choice is to Spend $10+ Billion to try to catch up to Tesla on a multi-year project or license an FSD the will have solved robotaxi.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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