rewrite this title Tesla Announces Features of AI5 Chip: Musk’s Claims Are Ambitious Once Again

Elon Musk has announced that Tesla’s next-generation FSD (Full Self-Driving) chip, the AI5, will be up to 40 times more powerful in certain areas, 8 times faster in raw performance, and have 9 times more memory compared to the current HW4 chip.

In a podcast, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared technical details about the company’s new FSD chip, the AI5. Musk stated that the AI5 will be up to 40 times more powerful in some metrics and 8 times better in raw processing power compared to the previous HW4 (also known as AI4) chip. It was also revealed that the new chip will have 9 times more memory capacity.

The AI5 Is Not an Ordinary Update

Elon Musk describes the AI5 not just as an update, but as an architectural leap. After developing the HW3 and HW4 chips, Tesla has a better understanding of its needs in the FSD domain. The AI5 aims to eliminate the hardware bottlenecks that the HW4 encountered.

While the HW4 chip has 16 GB of RAM, it is stated that Tesla plans to use up to 144 GB of RAM with the AI5. This large amount of memory is crucial for the needs of AI applications. The true power of the AI5 comes not just from the numbers but from its customized design. The 40-fold performance increase is primarily due to the chip’s ability to run computationally intensive processes—which were a bottleneck in the HW4—much more efficiently. For example, the “softmax” function, which is frequently used in AI models, will run in fewer steps. The AI5 will also be able to manage mixed-precision models more effectively and dynamically. This kind of optimization is only possible through complete coordination between the hardware and software teams.

The AI5 is expected to be the core chip that will run the next generation of FSD software. While Tesla announced plans to achieve unsupervised FSD on the HW4, it is likely that the AI5 will provide this experience first, and then it will be adapted for the HW4. Musk also expressed his confidence that current HW4 chips are two to three times safer than a human driver and could be 10 times safer with the right optimizations.

Meanwhile, the AI5 chip will be manufactured at TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan, followed by its new facility in the U.S. In a statement in July, Musk had announced that the AI6 chip would be produced at Samsung’s U.S. facility. Samsung also currently manufactures the AI4 chips.

Musk’s FSD Claims Are Concerning

Tesla, and by extension Musk, has been claiming since 2016 that all vehicles it produces will have the ability to drive in an unsupervised autonomous manner. In the past, Musk said this would happen in 2018, but even today, it is not possible to fully speak of unsupervised FSD. On the other hand, Tesla has sold the FSD software package for prices up to $15,000, promising that the advanced driver assistance system would become fully autonomous through over-the-air software updates.

Despite almost a decade passing, this promise has not been fulfilled, and Tesla has officially confirmed that all vehicles produced between 2016 and 2023 do not have the appropriate hardware to provide the promised unsupervised autonomous driving. Musk has discussed upgrading the computers in these older vehicles to appease owners, but there is still no concrete plan to implement this. The HW4 hardware, as is known, was released in 2023.

Even more interesting, Tesla has also made some changes to the wording of the FSD package it sells. While Tesla had been selling the software package to FSD buyers with a promise of unsupervised autonomous driving capabilities until at least 2023, it now sells customers only the FSD (Supervised) package. And in the fine print, it is stated that the vehicle is not “autonomous” and this is not promised as a feature.

This means that people who buy FSD from Tesla today are not purchasing the unsupervised autonomous driving capability that previous buyers did. As a result, FSD no longer offers the initial promise that Tesla owners could fall asleep in their cars and wake up at their destination—a promise Musk used for years to sell Tesla vehicles.

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