Hey everybody RobMower here, welcome back to Tesla Daily today. Of course we are going to be talking about FSD Beta version 12. We've also got updates on hardware 4, project highland, Cybertruck, and a few other items as well. Tesla stock starting off the week in green just barely up 10th of a percent to close at $238.82 while the NASDAQ was up 8-10th of a percent on the day to day.
Alright FSD Beta version 12 as promised Elon did due to livestream for version 12 on Friday, of course right after Tesla Daily had ended, but we'll catch up on that today. He did also participate in brief twitter space prior to that livestream starting. A few interesting details from that that we'll talk about, but let's just start off with the FSD Beta livestream itself, which was a hardware 3 vehicle running FSD Beta version 12 in Palo Alto for about 45 minutes, with Elon just picking random destinations and dropping pins and seeing how the car performed.
My reaction and the reaction I'm seeing from others I think this was ahead of what we probably expected for FSD Beta version 12 at this point. Not perfect, there was one disengagement and another time where it sounded a turn way too long and most people probably would have intervened for that. But in general, seemed very steady, seemed very comfortable, Elon remarked on that a number of times just how comfortable and smooth it was. And although it probably wasn't the most challenging FSD Beta drive that's ever been attempted to say the least, there were challenging scenarios with construction, with roundabouts, with pedestrians.
And although this was Palo Alto and you can see Tesla's driving around constantly, so Tesla's got a lot of data here, the routes did seem to be random, so not pre-planned, which is nice to see. So overall, a really nice drive, probably pretty similar to what we might see from 11.4.7, which at this stage I think would be great for version 12, as obviously it's still an unreleased version and there are reasons for that. But again, probably a little bit closer to being ready for that than what maybe we would have expected going into it.
Most impressive to me though, rather than the drive itself, was the commentary that Elon provided during the drive, particularly noting that in the current version, there are over 300,000 lines of code, referring there to either entirely or primarily C++ programming, relying on a lot of heuristics that Tesla programs in to make decisions on how to drive. And as we know, with version 12 Tesla trying to remove that and go fully end-to-end neural network from perception to vehicle planning, basically going from a raw photon input to vehicle control output with essentially only neural networks in between.
So 300,000 lines of code Elon in this drive said that this version has quote unquote basically none of that. Although we knew Tesla was heading in that direction with version 12, this to me is one of the areas where things were ahead of my expectations. I figured okay, Tesla will head that direction, maybe it's a multi-step process where pieces of it happen at different times, with Elon saying that there's basically none of that, maybe there still is a little bit of that happening, but largely, he said that those 300,000 lines of code basically just removed, meaning this version of version 12 is already pretty much end-to-end.
That's extremely exciting, especially if the capability of this version 12 is already similar to the version 11.4.7 that we've got now, which although it ends up looking pretty similar on a live stream, this is just a fundamentally completely different architecture from current version. Elon specifically said that all of this is just a neural network making decisions based off of the weights of the neural network based off of the training video data that Tesla has supplied to it. There's no programming of speed bumps, but it slows down. There's no programming to pull over to the side of the road into destination, but it does and it parks there. There's no code to tell it what a roundabout is or how to drive through it, but it does and on and on and on throughout this entire drive.
Like this is pretty mind-blowing stuff, think about it from the perspective of Tesla's vehicle perception, and we've known that that's used neural networks for a long time. Think about if that had to use specific lines of code, how many lines of code Tesla would need to just even interpret the scene as opposed to a neural network that's been trained already on millions of those scenes. When you think about it from sort of that image analysis perspective, it should be so clear why the neural network is so much more efficient, faster, more effective, and probably most importantly can be improved more quickly than trying to hard code that type of an interpretation.
So it's a little bit more intuitive when you're thinking about images or video. It's just applying that same sort of logic to decision making now rather than perception. Not as intuitive, but that is the same fundamental shift in architecture that we are now seeing for planning and control of the vehicle with FSD beta version 12.
And taking that line of thought even a bit further, not only will this fundamentally change the decisions that the Tesla, the vehicle itself, is making, but also its interpretation of planning and control of other actors in the scene, whether it's vehicle, pedestrian, whatever else, those things are also all going to be influencing the neural network and the output from it to actually control the vehicle.
So this really is mind-blowing stuff and again, completely different than current architecture, but you look at the video, it kind of looks the same. I think most people just say, Oh yeah, another Mafestee Beta version, you know, there's still a disengagement. It's not driving around downtown Manhattan during rush hour, etc, etc. But again, all that is failing to recognize how truly different this is.
So anyway, hearing that that is really the stage that Tesla is at right now, that was the most exciting part for me. And my hope, which I think is at least somewhat rooted in reality, is that this architecture should allow Tesla to improve the rate of progress on FSD. And Elon did say in the live stream that he feels good that Tesla is now at a place where they have a very rapid and virtuous cycle of updating the weights of the neural networks with high quality video data. That may now be the biggest challenge with FSD is acquiring that data. Tesla's very well positioned to do that, refining that data, making sure that it is truly high quality data, and then training on that data, which we know is going to require a lot of compute and Tesla working really hard on that.
So we've talked a lot about the compute constraint. I think that's pretty well documented. The refining to get high quality data, that's been a little bit less of a focus Tesla has talked about things to automate that at AI day. But that is an area that is a part of the progress path and now becomes a bigger part that is just kind of worth keeping an eye on listening to the things Tesla has to say about that when we consider how things develop from here.
Now some more context I want to pull in here. Elon did as I mentioned do that Twitter space before this FSD beta drive. He mentioned on that that Tesla is probably going to spend around $2 billion on training this year alone. And he said they'll probably spend similar or probably even more next year, a decent amount of that should be hardware. So that may last a while. But that's a pretty decent amount of Tesla's expenditures. Said that they are going to continue buying Nvidia alongside trying to ramp dojo. Said that they are doing some training on dojo already. We did know that previously. Hopefully that will ramp up your significantly. And then also mentioned that they are going to be starting today actually a new 10,000 unit cluster of H100s from Nvidia.
If we go back to the graph that Tesla had posted about getting to 100 exa flops of compute over the next year or so, they put this in units of A100. So I'm not sure for Tesla's purposes how they would compare the H100s to the A100s. But it should be at least two times. Potentially more feel free to share your thoughts on that. But if we assume that's equivalent to 20,000 A100s, this should at least be doubling Tesla's compute capability from just a few months ago.
It's even more exciting now that we know more about version 12 and can see that it should be able to take even better advantage of that additional capacity. And as we previously talked about, things are going to continue to scale extremely quickly for compute for Tesla from this point. Tesla's head of AI infrastructure tweeted about this saying Tesla AI 10K H100 cluster go live on Monday. Due to real world training, we may have the largest training data sets in the world hot tier cache capability beyond 200 petabytes orders of magnitudes more than large language models join us and quote another member of the Tesla AI team shared a similar thought and also noted that version 12 and then training is compute bottlenecked.
So extremely exciting times for FSD for Tesla AI right now. I know sometimes the progress and the consumer product can feel a little bit slow, but I do think there's a lot of fundamental progress happening behind the scenes that isn't always immediately apparent. I mean, this drive is a great example of it.
Oh yeah, another disengagement same old FSD. But that is definitely not the case. I'm actually a little bit glad that there was an intervention because obviously Tesla community can hype things up at times. It was good for us to see that this is still a work in progress. There's going to be a lot of work to do still from this point. But hopefully that work is being done on the right architecture. And there's a reason that Tesla's going to spend, you know, forward $5 billion on this over the next couple of years.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done and that can be painfully slow, especially if expectations are high. So we've got to keep that in mind as well. But a lot to be excited about. I would also say that that point on the amount of money that Tesla's investing in this, it's a great reminder why automargans today, they're really overemphasized. Not that they're not important.
We've talked about this, but what's most important is that Tesla is able to fund these types of projects, fund the increase in scale that the business is going after. So that both with autonomy, with electric vehicles, and with the projects that Tesla has on the future roadmap that they can bring those to life. No one today or in 2021, when the stock was going way up, cared about what Tesla's margins were on the model aspect in whatever random quarter in 2012, none of that stuff matters at all once the new business lines take over.
Those things were important at the time for Tesla to get where they are and just kind of an overall sense of health of the business, not saying it's not important. But oftentimes those things get easily overemphasized. So just a good reminder of where Tesla is heading.
A couple other interesting details, then we'll move on. Elon did say that FSD version 12 is being tested all around the world. He mentioned specifically in New Zealand, Thailand, Norway, Japan, but other countries as well. And it sounded like international expansion is a relatively high priority item for Tesla. So I think many people will be happy to hear that.
And then Elon did have a couple of comments on hardware for said hardware for software will lag hardware three by at least another six months as our focus needs to be on getting FSD on hardware three working super well and provided internationally. So definitely disappointing to hear that for hardware for vehicles. Elon did reply to a comment from dirty Tesla on X saying that this really would be something more like six months rather than something like two years.
And that maybe it would be less on the Twitter space he mentioned that they just had to do a lot of retraining because of how the sensor inputs come into the neural networks. Also an interesting tidbit on hardware for he mentioned that hardware three is all being done on computing hardware in the vehicle that's only drawing 100 watts of power. Obviously impressive. We have known that though, but on hardware for he said that that will draw a little bit more power he didn't specify how much. But interesting to hear that Tesla's decided that those trade offs are worth it from a little bit more power hungry hardware perspective.
All right, moving on from FSD we've got a couple quick updates on Highland and Cybertruck really quickly on Highland. There have been a few more sightings coming out of China of Tesla testing model three vehicles that are covered in the front and the back. I don't think we've got too many new rumors over the last few days but more of these sightings. So we'll keep an eye on that. And for Cybertruck of course more of these sightings a lot on transport trailers. Seen a lot of that already but Ezekiel Overstreet posted on X a drone shot of 13 different Cybertrucks in the same frame in the parking lot at Giga Texas. And of course that's after some have already been shipped out.
So pretty high number to be seeing all in the same place. There's also a newly wrapped version of the Cybertruck that we're seeing this one rather than being an F-150 wrap seems to be a Toyota Tundra wrap. So it looks like Tesla continuing to have a little bit of fun there and maybe antagonize some of their biggest competitors in that segment.
Next we've got a great update from Joe Tagmyer. He made his way out to the Corpus Christi Tesla lithium refinery location. Of course the location that Tesla just broke ground on earlier this year. So we get to see a little bit of the progress. Definitely seems to be coming along pretty quickly and also gives us a nice point of reference for hopefully some more updates on this in the coming months.
Next we've got an update on Megapack. I think this was from Friday but some of your merit noting on X that Tesla has dropped the price of one Megapack from about $1.9 million to about $1.5 million. So about a 22% reduction. This does seem like a big price cut. However it's worth noting that Tesla did have different prices based on the number of Megapacks being ordered. So across the entire quantity spectrum I'm not sure what the average price change would be. Tried to look your way back machine but it didn't work. But may not be a significant for larger quantities I'm not sure. And then it's probably also worth noting that although the price previously would have indicated something like $479 per kilowatt hour. If we look at the quarterly filings Tesla hasn't really been earning close to that on energy sales at least in terms of what's being recognized.
Last quarter for example Tesla deployed 3.65 gigawatt hours of energy storage which at $479 a kilowatt hour would be over $1.7 billion in revenue but Tesla's total revenue reported for energy including solar was only $1.5 billion. So I don't know exactly what causes that difference whether that's driven by bulk orders or revenue recognition or something else. But because of that I think it's difficult to assess exactly how big of a price cut this may end up being in reality. Something we'll definitely keep an eye on and then it looked like Tesla also shorted the estimated delivery windows. I think that's more likely to be a reflection of good news in Tesla's production plans than bad news in their order rate. Although obviously interesting to see that paired with a lower price in the design studio which could suggest more of the latter. But at the same time price decreases could correspond to increased production rates and lower cost of goods sold per unit from that increased production. So could either be really good news here or not so great news but because energy has been doing so well I lean more towards the optimistic take.
Alright last couple of things here we've got an updated note from Alex Potter of Piper Sandler. They have reiterated their overweight rating and $300 price target for Tesla stock after a visit to Gigaboolet. I don't think there's anything on production rates or anything like that but a couple of the key takeaways just in general from the note that I thought were interesting. Piper Sandler says that relative to price cuts adds maybe a cheaper way to boost orders and that tests are ongoing. So enough that information would be coming from Tesla or just their observation of some of the things that we have seen. They also note that rising EV inventory may be due to Tesla's price cuts with other brands unable to compete. And on Berlin they mentioned that Berlin based production of battery cells is still on hold because of the implications of the Inflation Reduction Act from North American battery production but that the buildings are ready. So we've talked about that before but something to continue to keep an eye on.
Alright last item for today just a quick look at the calendar. I don't think we looked at this on Friday so a lot of economic reports coming up this week. I want to particularly highlight the PCE Personal Consumption Expenditures report on Thursday morning. The Fed likes that one a lot and we're already almost into September here and looking forward to the next FOMC meeting in mid-September. So we'll see how that one comes in and how expectations for the September meeting change off of it. Then also of note here you may see the GDP release for Q2. For some context on that GDP does get released three times and this is the second release so not the final not the first but rather an updated preliminary number for Q2. The first time around this came in at 2.4% so see if any major changes on that but probably not quite as notable as the first GDP release.
Alright that is it for today then as always thank you for listening make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications. You can also find me on the X at Tesla podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Tuesday August 29th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.