I understand what you're saying, but I find it very difficult to believe that the current prominent shortcomings of FSD are due to a scarcity of data. Once FSD stops making its current set of very common mistakes (like trying to go straight from a left-turn-only lane), and starts getting into the long tail of very unusual and weird situations, then I'll understand the need to gather 10x or 100x more data. But not yet. The danger of potential customers being alienated by FSD's current common and obvious mistakes far outweighs the benefit to Tesla of gathering a little bit more data at this point.
Defending or debating this is admittedly not very easy from the outside. By that I mean two things really, that we are outside of Tesla and also, for most of including myself, outside of the expertise of this rapidly developing field of applied AI technology.
We really don't know how much data and what kinds of data Tesla needs at this stage. It seems like they're past the initial phase of simply needing positive examples of good driving, in various environments and traffic scenarios. If that positive reinforcement method were all they had, then "unlearning" bad behavior would be primarily accomplished by carefully curating and removing any unintended bad examples in the training data, combined with massive quantities of additional positive-reinforcement example training data. In fact, that's kind of what Elon suggested when he and Ashok published that 2023 live stream video in which the car did fail at a turn-arrow traffic light.
In that prior context, it wasn't clear what role the disengagement data would play, i.e. how these negative training examples could be used to teach what not to do. I haven't been searching this much, so I'm probably lacking in my knowledge of popular explanatory links that may be available right now - but AFAIK the current rumors are that Tesla now wants disengagement data. So something has changed in that respect, since the live stream video demonstration and commentary.
If all they really wanted for further progress was a continuing huge source of human driving data, drawn from all over North America and beyond, well that's available already from the majority of Tesla cars that
don't run FSD - and in that case the nearly-universal free trial would then be entirely counterproductive to progress! Unless of course, we come back to the theory that Elon actually thinks it's time to make big bucks from people so convinced of FSD greatness, that they will subscribe or purchase in huge numbers...
No one here believes that kind of take rate and financial boon is really likely for FSD (Supervised) in today's form. Nor is the theory of an attempted EOQ stock bump at all convincing; Elon just doesn't think that way no matter how much people like to claim it. And even for those who bear ill feelings towards Elon, I think it's a very uncompelling argument that Elon is dumber endless informed about this than all the rest of us.
Taking all the reasoning above, the simplest explanation that makes sense to me is that
a) Tesla has figured out the ways to use negative reinforcement from disengagement data, and has decided this is now more important than an emphasis on yet more human manual driving data from the customer Fleet.
b) The most clever way to maximize the flow of disengagement data is to give FSD to anyone and everyone for at least a few weeks. It remains to be seen whether a large enough fraction of these previously non-FSD users will keep it active long enough and often enough to make this a successful strategy - and we probably won't be told one way or the other.
BTW even though I don't believe it's really the immediate main purpose of the trial program, I have no doubt that there will be a non-trivial uptick of the subscription take rate, because we do see some pretty positive commentary from people who never much liked it before.
There will def8nitely also be those who are disappointed and may be unlikely to try it again very soon, and unfortunately also those who get damaged wheels or worse because they're not ready to handle this arguably too-early release. We can count on the news media to let us know all about these, with as much exaggeration and sensationalism as possible.
