Before Thanksgiving is over in California, I just wanted to write a quick post to say how thankful I am for all the brilliant people working so hard on Tesla Autopilot & FSD. I’m thankful to everyone at Tesla for working so hard on something so important, but Autopilot & FSD are especially near and dear to my heart. To all the people across the company working on this, including the Autopilot software team, the AI team, people working on the labeling stack and using it to generate training data, the ADAS testers around the world, the chip design team, the vehicle hardware team, the people working in the factories, and so many others I’m forgetting… thank you so much.

I believe that this is the most important software project in the world right now. It is singlehandedly pushing the industry forward and moving the needle in a way that would not be happening without regular deployments at Tesla’s scale. Just as with electric vehicles in general, what Tesla is doing is bringing us vehicle automation sooner than it otherwise would have arrived otherwise. Since lives are lost every additional day we delay, I can’t underscore enough the critical importance of this effort.

More than that, I really enjoyed using the software and helping to test it over the last year. Even in this early pre-release state, FSD is already incredibly useful and improving at an accelerating rate. It’s clear to me that this product will be a hit long before full autonomy. Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard every day, even on nights and weekends, to make sure the updates we get are safe, functional, and continue to improve. Frankly, the progress you have all made in the last year is astounding and it makes me incredibly optimistic about the future.

You are all brilliant people. You could have gotten jobs anywhere, working on something much easier than this. But many of you stayed to work through this important problem, even when it meant making personal sacrifices and working under immense pressure. Thank you for that. I hope you know how much it means to all the customers whose lives you’re impacting.

Not only are you under immense pressure from Tesla, but there’s also immense public and regulatory pressure as well. I can’t imagine what it takes to consistently do such excellent work under such intense scrutiny. The road here has been tough, and the worst may be yet to come — but there are millions of customers standing behind you, thankful for what you’re doing. After all is said and done, you will be able to look back and know that you changed things. You’ll be able to look at the number of lives saved, hear people talk about the convenience they’ve gained, and watch the economic boom you’ve created. I hope you are all as proud of yourself as we are of you.

To everyone working on Tesla Autopilot & FSD, thank you. Thank you to Ashok, Milan, Andrej, and everyone else. You’ve shattered the limits of my imagination when it comes to what deep learning & AI can do today. I can’t wait to see what happens next.