Tesla ships FSD v12 — an end-to-end neural network

In early 2024 Tesla began rolling out FSD (Supervised) version 12, which replaced the previous system’s roughly 300,000 lines of explicit C++ control code with an end-to-end neural network: video frames in, driving controls out, learned from millions of clips of human driving rather than hand-coded rules.

The “photons in, controls out” approach is the same paradigm shift that transformed speech and image recognition, applied to driving. It made the system’s behaviour markedly smoother and is the architecture underpinning Tesla’s push toward unsupervised autonomy and the 2025 Robotaxi launch. It remains a driver-assistance system requiring supervision, but the architecture is a real engineering milestone.