Elon Musk is now hyping Tesla’s 8th-gen AI chip, but he still hasn’t delivered the promised self-driving for millions of Tesla owners with the 3rd-gen chip, nor with the current 4th-gen chip in production.
Musk, whose compensation package at Tesla is up for a shareholder’s vote this week, has coincidentally been sharing more of what he does at Tesla lately to justify his upt to $1 trillion compensation package.
This weekend, he posted on X an update about Tesla’s AI chip roadmap:
Just finished a long AI5 design review with the Tesla California and Texas chip engineers. It’s going to be great. And AI6 and AI7 will follow in fast succession. AI8 will be out of this world.
Those chips power Tesla’s inference computing in its vehicles, enabling its advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving capabilities.
Currently, Tesla is producing AI4, its fourth-generation chip.
However, the automaker has been selling to customers the capability to achieve “Full Self-Driving” unsupervised capacity since its second-generation chip.
When it failed, it retrofitted second-gen cars with a new “HW3” third-generation chip.
In January, Musk admitted that Tesla’s HW3 in-car computer is not powerful enough to support unsupervised self-driving. He said Tesla would once again offer retrofits, but it’s been 10 months, and Tesla hasn’t communicated any concrete plan to make it right with customers.
During Tesla’s earnings call last month, Tesla partially walked back Musk’s previous admission that HW3 won’t support unsupervised self-driving.
CFO Vaibhav Taneja said:
“We’ve not completely given up on hardware 3.”
He didn’t really elaborate on what it means, but Tesla’s VP of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, added:
“Once the v14 release series is fully done, we are planning on working on a v 14 Lite version for hardware 3. Probably expected in Q2 next year.”
V14 is currently available on Tesla vehicles with HW4, but it is still not capable of unsupervised self-driving as Tesla sold and promised to customers.
Electrek’s Take
It’s pretty wild that instead of delivering what it promised and sold to HW3 customers, Tesla now says that you might get a watered-down version of something else that is already available. And that’s going to be 6 months from now.
There’s moving the goal post, and then there’s throwing it away altogether.
Now, the fascinating thing is that Musk is talking about AI5, coming in 2026, then AI6. Now, he is even talking about AI7 and AI8.
We know what happens when Tesla launches a new self-driving computer. It gradually shifts its efforts into bigger models that fit on the new computer, but they don’t on the old one.
At this point, everything points to AI4 going the same way as HW3.
Tesla would have avoided itself a lot of headaches if it would have simply waited to have solved autonomy before selling it to customers.
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