Tesla’s latest software update, 2024.26.15, finally brings Full Self-Driving (FSD) version 12.5 to vehicles equipped with the older Hardware 3 (HW3/AI3) computer. The update was deployed to employees for internal testing on Wednesday.
The road to FSD v12.5 on HW3 vehicles has been a long one. When Elon Musk initially announced that FSD v12.5 would be rolled out to vehicles equipped with HW4/AI4, he also mentioned that the update would be available for HW3 within about ten days, with the delay blamed on the need for code optimization to ensure that the new FSD model could function effectively on the older HW3 hardware, which lacks the computing power of the newer AI4 platform.
However, that timeline passed, but finally after 23 days, Tesla has rolled out FSD v12.5.1.4, with support for HW3 vehicles, to employees for internal testing on Wednesday night, according to Not A Tesla App.
This was later confirmed by Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, who explained that his team faced several challenges in adapting FSD v12.5 for HW3. One of the main hurdles was the difference in computational capabilities between HW3 and AI4. According to Elluswamy, the team had to deploy a smaller model on HW3 to achieve similar performance to AI4’s FSD v12.5 release. This involved implementing several kernels in the compiler to emulate operations natively supported on AI4 hardware.
Despite these challenges, Elluswamy expressed confidence in Tesla’s ability to bring the full FSD v12.5 model to both hardware platforms in the future, leveraging model compression techniques and other innovations to bridge the gap between HW3 and AI4.
We were able to achieve similar performance as the AI4 12.5 release with a relatively smaller model for AI3. Deploying the larger model requires us to implement a few kernels in the compiler to emulate the same operations that are natively supported on the AI4 hardware. The team…
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) August 21, 2024
With FSD v12.5 now in the hands of employees, the next question becomes when it will begin rolling out to owners. That all depends on whether any major bugs are found by employees, but if all goes well, it could be in the hands of the public before the end of the week.
