Todd Burch
14-Year Member
Agree. I cannot fathom the planet in which v12 is only marginally better than v11.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
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FEERSUMENDJIN
Member
Replaced a 10 year old Renault Grand Scenic diesel MPV with a M3P off the first boat to the UK in 2019. Transformed my life ! Still grinning from ear to ear. (already had Tesla shares since the first landing of Falcon 9 blew my mind)
FEERSUMENDJIN
Member
Yup. Still seeing 2024 massive luxury gas guzzlers driving around, and I am just speechless.
Those should really be taxed out of existence.
I will reiterate that we are talking about the US here. China and Europe don't seem to be having much trouble.
It seems to me that most potential EV buyers are held back by two fears. The first is fear that they won't be able to charge. The second is the fear that the battery is going to die and will cost $10,000 to replace.
So my number one recommendation would be to flood the nation with L2 chargers. Put them in every apartment complex, office complex, and shopping center. Put them everywhere there is street level parking in big cities. Right now, if you don't own an EV, you have no idea where the chargers are because you don't notice them. But once you know where the chargers are, the fear is gone.
My number two recommendation would be for Tesla to raise its battery warranty to at least 200,000 miles. I think Tesla could easily afford to replace the few battery packs that fail before 200,000 miles. Then the other automakers would have to raise their warranties as well.
Not convinced by this. SAAS companies deserve a higher multiple because they may scale very quickly without any incremental costs. If we are talking FSD for Teslas alone this is not the case, since the max number of FSD subscription is still the same as the number of Teslas with the right hardware. So the long term growth potential should be the same as sold cars (until and unless they license FSD to others). Also, I am not sure about the take rate (even at 99 USD). It seems a lot of people don't even want to buy a car if the monthly cost is slightly higher due to interests rates, which makes me wonder how many are prepared to pay over a thousand USD per year just for added convenience. It seems to me a "nice to have" but not a "need to have". Lastly, I cant see how his excel is set up and I didn't double check it but just from how he describes it, it seems he mixes revenues with profits.Good video by Yashu.
Meanwhile, The Voice of Wall Street, Bary Glack forgets the very basic, fundamental principles of stock valuation
I have similar issues. While it is cool tech I still need to disengage multiple times on my 7 mile commute. Especially on the way home out of the city, I don’t even try using it anymore in this situation as it is useless and causes to many problems.
I am not sure how they would even fix the issues I have on my commute home. To describe it, it’s almost like someone that is a decent driver but has never driven in my city, therefore, it doesn’t anticipate which lane it needs to be in to not get stuck in the wrong lane during rush hour traffic. I could totally see a human new to my city driving during rush hour doing the exact same thing.
However, I did drive through a school zone yesterday that had a flashing light indicating a lower speed and it slowed down as I would have. I will drive through there again not during school hours to see if it slows down or maintains speed.
Interesting. I wonder if these issues would be less obvious or even existing if (i) all cars were on FSD so you would not need to drive "aggressively" because everybody else does (thinking about driving in for instance Italy where you will get stuck if you are too courteous) or (ii) FSD vehicles had better map and fleet awareness, so they were able to better plan their drives. Because as far as I understand, correct me if wrong, FSD is precisely as you describe just reacting to the things instantly around it.
I guess it depends on how much you value safety. One prevented accident at 70+ mph is worth at least the full price of FSD. This is especially true as you get older and your reflexes slow. I consider FSD a "need to have" on road trips and a "really good to have" in town. Since I've been using it, it has saved me from one accident where someone cut across three lanes of traffic to turn left, right in front of me (FSD applied the brakes to save me from hitting him) and a second time from me hitting a runner at a four way stop. FSD was stopped and saw the runner (which I didn't see due to sun in my eyes) so it stayed stopped. Runners are not common at that intersection so there was a good chance he would have been hit by me.
How about offering gutted 2-person cargo models for postal/local delivery/camping use?
Even if folded, those rear seats eat up a LOT of extra space.
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School zones are definitely one of my biggest problems with it currently. In New Orleans, all school zones have speed-based traffic ticket cameras, so making a mistake there is expensive. It doesn't seem to understand them at all and just ignores them.
In v11, I could manually set the speed slower as I approach one, and it would quickly adjust to my manually set speed. In v12 it very slowly drifts toward what I manually set -- not nearly quickly enough to avoid a ticket, so I end up disengaging at that point. So they basically took away my work-around. ... which I wouldn't care that much about if they solved the initial problem.
Oddly enough, they know where the school zone traffic cameras are -- they do now mark them correctly on the map. They just don't do anything about them.
If and when FSD can be proven to drive safer, I guess it could go from prohibited to allowed to mandatory. But that's still some time away and for now I think most people are not as humble as you but suffer from the "I am a superior driver syndrome"
https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...ad37e00352406dd776bc010769489b2412951c7d?p2dfThat's where advertising helps -- addressing the concern of each group of late adopters one at a time while slowly building your reputation. You don't pull that lever until you're ready to address that particular group. And timing when you pull each particular advertising lever is important. With Musk's thinking, you don't pull it at all when you're in the early adopter phase, but I suspect we're approaching the time to pull at lest one advertising lever to address at least one late adopter group.
The model gets bigger yes, but does not require lots of computational power on the inference side which is what the fsd computer is doing once the algorithmis trained. It only needs to serve one end user so you can't compare it to cloud based inferencing datacenters which serves million of users simultaneously. 72 TOPs is pretty extensive for only a few output answers (speed, go, brake, left, right, reverse) and only for one car.I just tried FSD 12 and was very impressed. Only 2 interventions needed over 30 miles and much more natural behavior, which is orders better than anything Tesla released before.
As a potential investor though, I need to determine whether FSD can achieve an intervention rate of 100x better for Teslabot (average person walks 2 miles a day) or 10,000x better for RT (> 100k miles per intervention), and the minimum timeframe for that. I also want this to be as quantitative as possible, despite the lack of empirical information.
Another premise is that when a breakthrough occurs, like end to end AI for FSD, extrapolating progress based on similar projects is better than using the history of the FSD prior to the step improvement. No one else is using the pure AI model like Tesla, so I'll use LLMs for reasons I'll describe later. There are lots of other generative models like image generation (predicts the image based on words) and video generation (predicts the next frames using previous frames, pictures, or words). All of these have much in common with FSD, which uses video input and a destination to predict its next driving action.
AI model "smartness" performance (as opposed to speed) depends on model design and training. The design dictates the number of parameters, which is proportional to the memory required for inference (prediction). I'll only include AI models since 2018 that are based on the transformer architecture, because these likely contain many elements in the FSD model.
The key for most generative AI is the transformer architecture, introduced in 2017. The earliest versions produced human-like responses, but were not very smart. As models increased in size, they become smarter with more training data. The performance of smaller models also improved with better design and training, but more parameters generally results in better inference.
I've listed some models to give an idea of size affects their performance. For fun, I've included responses by the models to some questions to give an idea of how "smart" the model is.
Question 1. What is the number that rhymes with the word for a tall plant?
Year Model Parameters Response 1 2018 GPT 1 117M "that's a lot of syllables, " ivy said, looking over her notes. 2019 GPT 2 1.5B "Thin is a word," I think someone said. 2021 GPT 3 175B 2022 GPT 3.5 350B ? The number that rhymes with the word for a tall plant is "four." 2023 GPT 4 >1T The number that rhymes with "tree," a word for a tall plant, is "three."
It's pretty obvious that GPT 4 is a lot smarter than prior models, but even the earliest models understand something, although not very much. Also note that the number of parameters since GPT 1 has increased exponentially each year. The improvements come at a price that is acceptable when computing in a remote data center.
For FSD, inference needs to be on the edge, in the vehicle. The next table shows Llama 2, an LLM released in 2023 with several model sizes. This is a good way to see how the model size influences the response.
Question 1. What is the number that rhymes with the word for a tall plant?
Question 2. A car cuts in front of a driver. He would need to swerve to avoid hitting it. If he goes left, he hits a curb. If he goes right, he hits a brick wall. In one sentence, describe his best option.
Year LLM Parameters Response 1 Response 2 2023 Llama 2 7B The number that rhymes with "tall" is "all". The best option for the driver is to swerve right, as hitting the brick wall is likely to cause less damage than hitting the curb on the left.
2023Llama 2 13B The word for a tall plant is "tall."
There is no number that rhymes with "tall."In this situation, the best option for the driver would be to swerve to the right, as hitting the brick wall would be less damaging than hitting the curb on the left. 2023 Llama 2 70B The word that rhymes with "tall plant" is "bant." The driver's best option in this situation would be to swerve right, towards the brick wall, but brake heavily and try to come to a stop before impact, hoping that the car that cut him off will stop or slow down enough to allow him to avoid a collision. 2023 Chat GPT > 1T The number that rhymes with "tree," a word for a tall plant, is "three." The driver's best option is to hit the curb by swerving left.
Me: Why?
Swerving to the left and hitting the curb is generally a safer option compared to swerving right and hitting a brick wall, as hitting the curb is less likely to cause severe damage or injury to the driver and passengers.
The Llama models do well compared to early GPT models with similar size. As the model size increases, the model seems to understand the question better. However, model size still reigns supreme. A model with 10-20x fewer parameters cannot compete against a larger one.
Given the above and the limited data available for FSD, my thoughts at this time are:
1. Regardless of training, there is a very high chance the HW3 or HW4 may not be able to achieve 10^4 fewer interventions. Training improves models up to a point, but size still matters when handling diverse input. Better training and design has improved smaller models, but models with 10-100x fewer parameters are not able to compete with larger one. Intuitively, this makes sense - the world's smartest dog is smart for a dog, but a smart dog is still a very dumb adult.
2. Improving the reliability of FSD will probably be slower and more difficult than most people think. GPT 4 took many years after GPT 1 to achieve orders of magnitude better performance and still required exponentially more parameters each year. FSD 12 needs to improve similarly, without substantially increasing the model size or power. This is far more difficult with those constraints.
3. Although LLM progress is not a perfect comparison, it seems like a reasonable start. A FSD RT with very high reliability needs to understand complex situations and behaviors to make good predictions, just like LLMs.
4. An issue I haven't touched on is processing speed. GPU processing speed is closely related to the number of parameters. If Tesla can solve this for the model size, I assume they can handle GPU computing requirements. Not a given either, but I'm being lazy
5. (edit) Teslabot is a lot easier than FSD. Besides the less critical nature of its decisions, the computing may not need to reside completely on the edge. The price of computing and power consumption may have more flexibility than cars, especially in a hybrid model where AI processing is not done complete on the bot.
Detailed benchmarks for different LLMs.
Enter your own text into LLMs with different model sizes (choose the Direct Chat tab at the top).
Things that significantly improve public safety really shouldn’t be locked behind a subscription pay gate especially when all cars have the hardware and it’s merely a software toggle.
If FSD prevents accidents at high speed, can detect pedestrians and avoid hitting them, etc then doesn’t it seem a bit immoral to not make those features standard across the fleet? Not even for the driver’s sake, for the sake of other users on public roads.
I know many posters here claim this often, but I don't feel the majority of people feel this way. Most people I know, and I'm talking about average or below average wealth people, they value money over safety because they are strapped financially. Most people would never consider paying for a software to drive them around when they can do it themselves for free, even if it is less safe.
I often see Tesla bulls claiming once FSD is solved the take rate will skyrocket and the price will go up, but personally I do not see it playing out that way. Most people can't afford FSD today at $12K so they certainly won't be able to afford it at a higher price, no matter how good it is.
My personal opinion is Tesla will LOWER the price once FSD is solved in order to increase adoption. Bulls like to forecast tens of billions of dollars of FSD profit, but it's important to remember Tesla's mission is NOT to produce huge profits, it's to create a better world. Look at how Tesla is willing to drop margins on the cars in order to increase sales, FSD will likely play out the same way in my opinion.
People like Gary Black get blasted for looking at TSLA's future conservatively, but to me many TSLA bulls go too far in the optimistic direction. Remember Tesla's mission and don't let emotions get in the way of being realistic or practical. And just because many of us here can easily afford to pay $12K+ for FSD does not mean most other people ever would.
IMHO of course, just my two cents.
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
Well put! ^^^^
Keeping Tesla's "Mission" in mind while evaluating them seems to be the thing many analysts and some of the folks on this forum consistently overlook.
This perspective bends the traditional profits-based analysis in a way that requires a paradigm shift for most people who are accustomed to business profits being the prime focus.
Tesla stays true to the mission, casually sacrificing profit margins when necessary to attain the goal of transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible. This is confusing to anyone who has grabbed the old yardstick to measure Tesla against.
Tesla sincerely offers to help those "competing against them" in order to increase their bringing compelling BEVs to market. What other company has ever behaved this way? Most analysts won't even take this into consideration, and so will not grok the importance of the mission when evaluating Tesla.
Due to this repeated inability to recognize this marked difference about Tesla, those analysts find themselves consistently vexed with their models not providing accurate projections for the company.
This is exactly why, when Tesla forecast slow production and delivery growth for 2024 few are able to anticipate what other aspects of Tesla might surprise over this period.
The convergence of AI, Energy, and Robotics that folks like Tony Seba and those at Ark Invest keep talking about continues to move forward, yet this is still not understood by anyone relying upon traditional methods of measuring a company when plotting Tesla's future. Those methods are not suited to considering such a mission and interpreting it over a longer time span than only a quarter, or a year.
HODL
Keeping Tesla's "Mission" in mind while evaluating them seems to be the thing many analysts and some of the folks on this forum consistently overlook.
This perspective bends the traditional profits-based analysis in a way that requires a paradigm shift for most people who are accustomed to business profits being the prime focus.
Tesla stays true to the mission, casually sacrificing profit margins when necessary to attain the goal of transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible. This is confusing to anyone who has grabbed the old yardstick to measure Tesla against.
Tesla sincerely offers to help those "competing against them" in order to increase their bringing compelling BEVs to market. What other company has ever behaved this way? Most analysts won't even take this into consideration, and so will not grok the importance of the mission when evaluating Tesla.
Due to this repeated inability to recognize this marked difference about Tesla, those analysts find themselves consistently vexed with their models not providing accurate projections for the company.
This is exactly why, when Tesla forecast slow production and delivery growth for 2024 few are able to anticipate what other aspects of Tesla might surprise over this period.
The convergence of AI, Energy, and Robotics that folks like Tony Seba and those at Ark Invest keep talking about continues to move forward, yet this is still not understood by anyone relying upon traditional methods of measuring a company when plotting Tesla's future. Those methods are not suited to considering such a mission and interpreting it over a longer time span than only a quarter, or a year.
HODL
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In other words, someone spends billions of dollars developing a system and now is forced to give it away. That's a real incentive to develop new products.
Stretch2727
Engineer and Car Nut
As well, I don't think many people understand the real maintenance saving of EV's as well. Tesla could include (excluding tires/wipers) maintenance for the 4 year warranty period and I don't think it would cost that much.
Besides the great driving experience, I always thought low maintenance and reliability would be one of the biggest things to draw people to EV's. It seems this has gotten lost in the noise with the Hertz disaster and all the OTA "recalls".
I don’t know how it would unfold, but I wouldn’t count on that angle being a big profit centre.
Have you heard Elon talk about an accident in 2018 with Barrett Riley and how it spurred him to improve safety?
The company won’t care about profiteering, they’ll care about saving lives — that I believe.
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