Tesla has shrunk down the current Hardware 4 code to 15% of its original size to allow it to run on HW3 models. This is the well known process of “AI distillation”.
A couple of years back when Trump denied China the latest NVIDIA chips, they got Chat-GPT to run just fine on older chips. Now NVIDIA is losing billions of dollars in sales to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/business/china-nvidia-chip-trump-ai.html
intercst
Do you think the 15% distilled model will help with the lawsuits?
And associated history:
2016 “All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software”
2019 “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,”
2019 “Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road,” “The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That’s all it takes.”
2020 “All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software.”
Of course.
If Tesla is able to run unsupervised FSD on HW3 vehicles without modification, that solves the lawsuit problem.
Some people point out that HW4 requires a front camera, which HW3 vehicles lack. But apparently it’s possible for the software to create a bird’s eye view from the existing cameras and infer what’s in front of the vehicle with a high degree of reliability. Humans lack the imagination to understand what AI is capable of.
intercst
Oh lord.
You’re not drinking the koolaid, too, are you?
Unsupervised with a larger model doesn’t work at sufficient safety on HW4 -Tesla just spent more than a year demonstrating that in Austin and Bay Area.
Now, given it don’t work on HW4, why would it work on HW3 with a smaller model?
Some do, some don’t.
But more importantly, what we can do is look at the actual track record in real life and draw reasonable conclusions.
And if none of the above works for you, the ceo said on the Q1 2026 earnings call that unsupervised won’t work on HW3:
It won’t work until it does. After you let things cook in the data center for a while, who knows what will emerge?
intercst
Not all HW4 vehicles have a front camera!
We’ve been told FSD will be solved by the end of the year since 2018. Six years ago. It still hasn’t happened. Neither has 500,000 robotaxis. Or the $25k EV. Or Roadster 2. Of course they are drinking the Kook Aid.
AI is being over-sold.