Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said on Monday that it delayed rolling out the new version of its full self-driving (FSD) advanced driver-assistance technology owing to issues with driving smoothness.
What Happened: “Sorry for the delay,” Musk wrote in response to a Tesla enthusiast who noted that the new version of the technology, namely v12.4.2, has started to roll out to employees.
The company trained the new version too much on interventions and not enough on normal driving, leading to a loss of driving smoothness, the CEO said. “It's like a doctor training too much on patients in the emergency room vs training on preventative care,” he wrote.
“Our next-gen AI model after this has a lot of promise: ~5X increase in parameter count, which is very difficult to achieve without upgrading the vehicle inference computer,” he added. A higher parameter count, he said in another post, is a representation of how well the AI model understands nuances of reality.
Why It Matters: Tesla is currently laser-focused on vehicle autonomy and is attempting to improve its FSD software to enable vehicles to operate without human intervention. However, it currently requires active driver supervision.
FSD is an advanced version of Tesla’s Autopilot and includes features like auto lane change and auto park. In a vehicle safety data report last month, Tesla alleged that its vehicles using Autopilot are relatively safer than its vehicles which do not use the system, and other non-Tesla vehicles.
However, safety concerns remain. In December, Tesla recalled a record-breaking 2.03 million vehicles equipped with all versions of Autosteer (an Autopilot feature), citing insufficient controls to prevent misuse. The company addressed the issue through a software update.
However, the U.S. auto safety regulator National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) commenced a probe into the remedy in April, concerned that the update is insufficient.
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