Tesla FSD 12.5 adds HW3 models onboard

Tesla has finally confirmed FSD 12.5 support for HW3 models and you can expect these cars to get the latest self-driving tech soon with an OTA software update.

The recent change has been made with software build 2024.26.15 with FSD v12.5.1.4. Unfortunately, the rollout is limited to employees due to the course of its validation.

The company is managing two different branches for HW3 and HW4 (AI4). The former is running version 12.3.6 and the latter has 12.5 and above.

Although Tesla is involved in achieving parity between the two states, customers want to get these latest FSD versions with their HW4 counterparts.

In that case, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla announced earlier this month that an FSD 12.5 rollout for HW3 could occur around Aug. 10. Now, the company has fulfilled this statement but the version won’t be available to public users. So, you will have to wait for another software release in case you are wondering whether this update will land on your HW3 Tesla.

This will solely depend on the time it takes to validate all aspects of hardware and software compatibility with older models.

Ashok Elluswamy from Tesla’a Autopilot and AI team has explained HW3 development in a broader aspect. Take a look below.

“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 is actively working on implementing and verifying those operations. Combined with other model compression techniques, we think we can run the same 12.5 model on both hardware platforms in the future.

That said, model parameter count is just one of the many axes of performance improvement. Dataset distribution, dataset quality, model architecture, training compute, etc., also have a tremendous impact on the final performance.”

Elluswamy has given no words about the general availability of FSD 12.5 for HW3 Tesla users but we’ll have to wait until the internal testing concludes.

(source – Notateslaapp)