Musk loves rubes

If you want to know who has a chance to compete with FSD, apart from the nasty quantization tail that can only be solved with Hardware In the Loop for training, you should also look at the compute. Elon mentioned that you need one H100 to simulate one HD camera at real-time speed. That translates to eight H100s for the complete system. Simulation is necessary for Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the most potent methods for training a neural network. Tesla has roughly 100,000 H100s available in Cortex. This is enough to simulate 12,500 full eight-camera systems in parallel. This is the best-case scenario, excluding gradient descent and all other overhead. Assuming the average driving speed of simulated scenarios is 50 km/h, you can simulate about 100 million km per week. However, you need to run each scenario several times — once per gradient descent iteration (or epoch). So if you assume 100 epochs (a reasonable ballpark guesstimate), you are down to 1 million km of RL training per week. If you want to reach superhuman safety, you need to train over several million kilometers. Considering you will need many iterations to add new scenarios, improve the reward function, try different network architectures, etc., you cannot get this done within a reasonable time if you do not have this amount of compute. Only Tesla has it. Nobody else is close. PS: To avoid any misunderstanding, I want to stress that I do not mean that millions of kilometers of data capture are enough to develop FSD. You need billions of miles captured by your fleet to discover the critical scenarios needed to train FSD (I explained that in a previous article).

My dad hasn’t driven a car in 3 years. My benchmark for when Tesla FSD has truly arrived, is if I would feel safe with it driving my father around. FSD 14.2 clears that benchmark. He now has the potential to travel to visit his grandkids or visit a grocery store, on his own. Safely. Now if we can just have the option to automatically park in the handicap spot, it would be absolutely perfect for him.