Tesla AI Day: what to expect from Elon Musk’s latest big announcement

It’s been almost two years since Tesla’s first “Autonomy Day” occasion, at which CEO Elon Musk made quite a few lofty predictions about the way forward for autonomous automobiles, together with his infamous claim that the corporate would have “a million robotaxis on the street” by the tip of 2020. And now it’s time for Part Deux.

This time, the occasion will likely be known as “AI Day,” and according to Musk, the “sole objective” is to influence consultants within the area of robotics and synthetic intelligence to return work at Tesla. The corporate is understood for its excessive price of turnover, the latest being Jerome Guillen, a key govt who labored at Tesla for 10 years earlier than just lately stepping down. Attracting and retaining expertise, particularly high tier names, has confirmed to be a problem for the corporate.

The August nineteenth occasion is scheduled to begin at 5PM PT / 8PM ET at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. In response to an invite obtained by Electrek, it’ll characteristic “a keynote by Elon, {hardware} and software program demos from Tesla engineers, check rides in Mannequin S Plaid, and extra.” Much like Battery Day, the occasion will likely be livestreamed on Tesla’s web site, giving traders and the media, in addition to the corporate’s many followers, an up-close have a look at what’s below growth.

Musk and different high officers on the firm are anticipated to supply updates on the rollout of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta model 9, which began reaching extra clients this summer season. We may get particulars about Tesla’s “Dojo” supercomputer, the coaching of its neural community, and the manufacturing of its FSD pc chips. And there will even be “an inside have a look at what’s subsequent for AI at Tesla past our automobile fleet,” the invitation says.

Let’s begin with what we all know and work our method towards the hypothesis of what’s to return.

FSD rollout

The massive information out of Tesla’s first Autonomy Day was the introduction of the company’s first computer chip, a 260 sq. millimeter piece of silicon that Musk described as “one of the best chip on this planet.” Initially, Musk had claimed that Tesla’s automobiles wouldn’t want any {hardware} updates, solely software program, on the street to full autonomy. Turns out that wasn’t exactly the case; they would want this new chip — two of them, truly — with a purpose to ultimately drive themselves.

Lots has occurred between the 2019 occasion and now. Final month, Tesla began shipping over-the-air software updates for FSD beta v9, its long-awaited, undoubtedly not autonomous, however definitely superior driver help system. That signifies that Tesla house owners who’ve bought the FSD possibility (which now prices $10,000) would lastly be capable of use a lot of Autopilot’s superior driver-assist options on native, non-highway streets, together with Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, AutoPark, Summon, and Site visitors Gentle and Cease Management.

The replace doesn’t make Tesla’s automobiles absolutely autonomous, nor will it launch “one million self-driving automobiles” on the street, as Musk predicted. Tesla house owners who’ve Full Self-Driving nonetheless want to concentrate to the street and preserve their fingers on the steering wheel. Some don’t, which might have tragic consequences.

Cherished by followers, loathed by security advocates, the FSD software program has gotten Tesla in loads of scorching water just lately. In recently publicized emails between Tesla and California’s Division of Motor Autos, the corporate’s director of Autopilot software program made it clear that Musk’s feedback (together with his tweets) don’t replicate the truth of what Tesla’s automobiles can truly do. And now Autopilot is under investigation by federal regulators who wish to know why Teslas with Autopilot preserve crashing into emergency automobiles.

Apart from the rollout of FSD beta v9, Tesla has additionally needed to alter to the worldwide chip scarcity. In a latest earnings name, Musk stated that the corporate’s engineers needed to rewrite some of their software with a purpose to accommodate alternate pc chips. He additionally stated that Tesla’s future progress will rely upon a swift decision to the worldwide semiconductor scarcity.

Tesla depends on chips to energy every part from its airbags to the modules that management the automobiles’ seatbelts. It’s not clear whether or not the FSD chips, that are produced by Samsung, are being impacted by the scarcity. Musk and his cohort could present some perception into that in this week’s occasion.

Dojo

Outdoors the automotive, Tesla makes use of a strong supercomputer to coach the AI software program that then will get fed to its clients through over-the-air software program updates. In 2019, Musk teased this “tremendous highly effective coaching pc,” which he known as “Dojo.”

“Tesla is creating a [neural net] coaching pc known as Dojo to course of really huge quantities of video knowledge,” he later tweeted. “It’s a beast!”

He additionally hinted at Dojo’s computing energy, claiming it was able to an exaFLOP, or one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second. That’s an unbelievable quantity of energy. “To match what a one exaFLOP pc system can do in only one second,” NetworkWorld wrote final 12 months, “you’d should carry out one calculation each second for 31,688,765,000 years.”

By the use of comparability, chipmaker AMD and pc builder Cray are presently working with the US Division of Power on the design of the world’s quickest supercomputer, with 1.5 exaFLOPs of processing energy. Dubbed Frontier, AMD says the supercomputer could have as a lot processing energy as the subsequent 160 quickest supercomputers mixed.

When accomplished, Dojo is predicted to be among the many strongest supercomputers on the planet. However relatively than performing superior calculations in areas like nuclear and local weather analysis, Tesla’s supercomputer is working a neural web for the needs of coaching its AI software program to energy self-driving automobiles. In the end, Musk has stated Tesla will make Dojo accessible to different corporations that wish to use it to coach their neural networks.

Earlier this 12 months, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI, gave a presentation on the 2021 Convention on Laptop Imaginative and prescient and Sample Recognition, throughout which he supplied extra particulars about Dojo and its neural community.

“For us, pc imaginative and prescient is the bread and butter of what we do and what permits Autopilot,” Karpathy stated, according to Electrek. “And for that to work very well, we have to grasp the information from the fleet, and practice huge neural nets and experiment rather a lot. So we invested rather a lot into the compute.”

Different robots?

Earlier this month, Dennis Hong, founding father of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA, tweeted a photo of a computer chip that many speculate is the in-house {hardware} utilized by Tesla’s Dojo.

However Hong is an fascinating determine for different causes, too. He specializes in humanoid robots and was a participant within the DARPA City Problem which kicked off the race for self-driving automobiles. (His staff positioned third.)

Requested on Twitter whether or not his lab was working with Tesla, Hong posted some playful emojis however in any other case declined remark. We could study extra about how Hong’s work and Tesla’s pursuits intersect throughout AI Day.

Musk has been forthcoming about his wishes for Tesla to develop into greater than only a automotive firm. “I feel long run, folks will consider Tesla as a lot as an AI robotics firm as we’re a automotive firm or an vitality firm,” he stated earlier this 12 months.

The longer term

A warning for anybody tuning in to the AI Day livestream: take Musk’s predictions about near-term accomplishments with a large grain of salt. The issues that will likely be mentioned throughout this occasion are unlikely to have any measurable impression on the corporate’s enterprise within the months to return.

Self-driving automobiles are an extremely troublesome problem. Even corporations like Waymo which might be perceived to have one of the best autonomous automobile expertise are still struggling to get it right. Tesla isn’t any completely different.

“A key query for traders will likely be what the newest timeline is for reaching full autonomy,” Loup Funds managing associate Gene Munster said in a note. “Regardless of Elon’s bold objective of the tip of this 12 months, our greatest guess is that 2025 would be the first 12 months of public availability of stage 4 autonomy.”

The remainder of 2021 is already jam packed for Tesla. The corporate must open factories in Texas and Germany. And it must instrument up manufacturing for its hotly anticipated Cybertruck, which has been delayed until 2022. Full autonomy, similar to it’s, can wait.

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