[modeless]

> it will probably not be very safe, otherwise nothing would stop Tesla from rolling out “the safe” autopilot to car owners today, unless you think that something will change in one month and we are getting some kind of breakthrough in software, so it seems like taxi will run today’s software.

The last version of FSD to increment the major or minor version number was released last year. There haven't been any big upgrades since then, they've only incremented the patch version number. Before that it had improved extremely rapidly for many months. The June robotaxi launch represents at least 6 months of improvement over the current public version of FSD, not one month. It's clear the team has focused exclusively on the robotaxi launch, and given the incredible pace of improvement of the public version in the year prior to their change in focus, I could easily imagine a huge improvement over the current (pretty good!) release.

Not only that, but I think there's a pretty good chance that the robotaxi version of the Model Y will include updated compute hardware, which I expect will significantly improve the performance of FSD just by virtue of running larger models. The difference between the HW3 and HW4 versions of FSD is quite significant with the only difference being compute, so it seems likely that even more compute could improve things further.

[UltraSane]

The most recent release of FSD is no where near good enough to do what Waymo does.

[modeless]

I use it every day and you are right! But my point is with six months of improvements in the software at the rapid pace demonstrated last year, combined with a boost from bigger models running on more capable compute hardware, I think it's possible that it could be close. Certainly up to the point where Waymo was when they started public rides three years ago.

[nocoiner]

FSD has been promised every year for the better part of, what, a decade? I’m dubious that a six-month sprint would be make or break for this finally happening.

[modeless]

I'm 100% with you on Elon crying wolf. But it's not really relevant. What they've achieved with FSD 13 is really quite amazing. Given how fast AI is advancing, is it so hard to believe that a system to drive cars using cameras will be feasible this year?

[energywut]

Yes. AI is advancing, but is still regularly making mistakes. Even in the domains where it excels, it still needs oversight from a skilled practitioner. Would you trust AI to run `rm` commands on your machine without your intervention? If not, why would you allow it to run a deadly multiton device on an unpredictable environment with adversarial actors?

AI is definitely not even close to being able to safely drive cars using cameras without an observant human driver.

[modeless]

I wouldn't trust a general LLM trained on reddit and 4chan (literally!) to run `rm` on my machine. But I would absolutely trust a purpose-built model trained on hundreds or thousands of years of data for a specific task. Models trained for specific tasks on huge datasets can be very reliable; certainly more reliable than humans.

I wouldn't let GPT-5 drive my car, but I let FSD drive it every day. It's not perfect yet, but I definitely see a day very soon when it will be better than me or any other single human, with all the failures humans have.

[energywut]

More than a decade. I bought my Tesla in 2014, and I recall the announcement because it came after I had bought but before I took possession of my car, and thus I was ineligible for the upgrade.

In hindsight, thank fuck. I would have dropped thousands on it in a heartbeat and never, ever seen it. (Also, that car was a nightmare to own and the service centers were really scammy. Getting rid of it was the best move I could have made.)