Image: Tesla

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says FSD Beta V9.3 is much improved over V9.2.

The road to achieving fully autonomous driving is challenging and filled with tremendous development effort. Tesla is the first company in the world to strive to make its cars so smart that they can self-drive in any road situation, regardless of location. To achieve this, the manufacturer created the new FSD Beta, which has a long road of training and polishing before the software reaches the public.

In mid-August, Tesla released FSD Beta V9.2, which contained significant improvements over the previous version. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared some technical details:

• Clear-to-go boost through turns on minor-to-major roads (plan to expand to all roads in V9.3).
• Improved peek behavior where we are smarter about when to go around the lead vehicle by reasoning about the causes for lead vehicle being slow.
• v1 of the Multi-modal predictions for where other vehicles expected to drive. This is only partially consumed for now.
• New Lanes network with 50k more clips (almost double) from the new auto-labeling pipeline.
• New VRU velocity model with 12% improvement to velocity and better VRU clear-to-go performance. This is the first model trained with "Quantization-Aware-Training," an improved technique to mitigate int8 quantization.
• Enabled Inter-SoC synchronous compute scheduling between vision and vector space processes. Planner in the loop is happening in v10.
• Shadow mode for new crossing/merging targets network which will help improve VRU control.

However, for a person who understands this much better than others, even these improvements are not impressive enough. On August 23, Musk tweeted that FSD Beta 9.2 is "actually not great." This does not mean that he is unhappy with this version and considers it bad in any sense. In fact, Musk sees it as another step towards making big improvements in future releases. The head of the company wrote that the Autopilot/AI team is rallying to improve FSD Beta as quickly as possible. He explained that the team is currently trying to create a single stack for both highways and city streets, but it requires massive neural network (NN) retraining.

FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great imo, but Autopilot/AI team is rallying to improve as fast as possible.

We’re trying to have a single stack for both highway & city streets, but it requires massive NN retraining.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2021

Eight hours after this tweet, Musk wrote that he had just tried out a new version of FSD Beta V9.3, which had not yet been sent out to testers. He drove from Pasadena (California) to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and seemed impressed, as he wrote that V9.3 was "much improved" over V9.2.

Just drove FSD Beta 9.3 from Pasadena to LAX. Much improved!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2021

Obviously, Tesla's Autopilot/AI team has had impressive success with the new version as they have received praise from Musk. Describing the technical details for V9.2 earlier, the head of the company wrote that the team aims to achieve a "clear-to-go boost through turns on minor-to-major roads (plan to expand to all roads in V9.3)." Perhaps the team managed to do it, which made Musk especially happy.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter

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