[AutonomousVehicles] what to expect from Tesla's AI Day Event

[Cornelius Butler]

Hi Fellow Committee Members,
below you will find an article about what to possibly expect from Tesla'S
AI Day event tonight. I'm including article text and article link.

Link to Article:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/18/22627101/tesla-event-ai-day-rumors-elon-musk-what-to-expect

Article Text:

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM TESLA’S AI DAY EVENT
Recruitment, robots, and really powerful supercomputers

By Andrew J. Hawkins at andyjayhawk  Aug 18, 2021, 10:00am EDT

t’sIt’s been nearly two years since Tesla’s first “Autonomy Day” event, at
which CEO Elon Musk made numerous lofty predictions about the future of
autonomous vehicles, including his infamous claim that the company would
have “one million robotaxis on the road” by the end of 2020. And now it’s
time for Part Deux.

This time, the event will be called “AI Day,” and according to Musk, the
“sole goal” is to persuade experts in the field of robotics and artificial
intelligence to come work at Tesla. The company is known for its high rate
of turnover, the latest being Jerome Guillen, a key executive who worked at
Tesla for 10 years before recently stepping down. Attracting and retaining
talent, especially top tier names, has proven to be a challenge for the
company.

The August 19th event is scheduled to start at 5PM PT / 8PM ET at Tesla’s
headquarters in Palo Alto, California. According to an invitation obtained
by Electrek, it will feature “a keynote by Elon, hardware and software
demos from Tesla engineers, test rides in Model S Plaid, and more.” Much
like Battery Day, the event will be livestreamed on Tesla’s website, giving
investors and the media, as well as the company’s many fans, an up-close
look at what’s under development.

Musk and other top officials at the company are expected to provide updates
on the rollout of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta version 9, which
started reaching more customers this summer. We may also get details about
Tesla’s “Dojo” supercomputer, the training of its neural network, and the
production of its FSD computer chips. And there will also be “an inside
look at what’s next for AI at Tesla beyond our vehicle fleet,” the
invitation says.

FSD ROLLOUT
The big news out of Tesla’s first Autonomy Day was the introduction of the
company’s first computer chip, a 260 square millimeter piece of silicon
that Musk described as “the best chip in the world.” Originally, Musk had
claimed that Tesla’s cars wouldn’t need any hardware updates, only
software, on the road to full autonomy. Turns out that wasn’t exactly the
case; they would need this new chip — two of them, actually — in order to
eventually drive themselves.

A lot has happened between the 2019 event and now. Last month, Tesla began
shipping over-the-air software updates for FSD beta v9, its long-awaited,
definitely not autonomous, but certainly advanced driver assist system.
That means that Tesla owners who have purchased the FSD option (which now
costs $10,000) would finally be able to use many of Autopilot’s advanced
driver-assist features on local, non-highway streets, including Navigate on
Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, AutoPark, Summon, and Traffic Light and Stop
Control.

The update doesn’t make Tesla’s cars fully autonomous, nor will it launch
“a million self-driving cars” on the road, as Musk predicted. Tesla owners
who have Full Self-Driving still need to pay attention to the road and keep
their hands on the steering wheel. Some don’t, which can have tragic
consequences.

Loved by fans, loathed by safety advocates, the FSD software has gotten
Tesla in a lot of hot water recently. In recently publicized emails between
Tesla and California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the company’s director
of Autopilot software made it clear that Musk’s comments (including his
tweets) do not reflect the reality of what Tesla’s vehicles can actually
do. And now Autopilot is under investigation by federal regulators who want
to know why Teslas with Autopilot keep crashing into emergency vehicles.

Aside from the rollout of FSD beta v9, Tesla has also had to adjust to the
global chip shortage. In a recent earnings call, Musk said that the
company’s engineers had to rewrite some of their software in order to
accommodate alternate computer chips. He also said that Tesla’s future
growth will depend on a swift resolution to the global semiconductor
shortage.

Tesla relies on chips to power everything from its airbags to the modules
that control the vehicles’ seatbelts. It’s not clear whether the FSD chips,
which are produced by Samsung, are being impacted by the shortage. Musk and
his cohort may provide some insight into that during this week’s event.

DOJO
Outside the car, Tesla uses a powerful supercomputer to train the AI
software that then gets fed to its customers via over-the-air software
updates. In 2019, Musk teased this “super powerful training computer,”
which he referred to as “Dojo.”

“Tesla is developing a [neural net] training computer called Dojo to
process truly vast amounts of video data,” he later tweeted. “It’s a beast!”

He also hinted at Dojo’s computing power, claiming it was capable of an
exaFLOP, or one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second.
That is an incredible amount of power. “To match what a one exaFLOP
computer system can do in just one second,” NetworkWorld wrote last year,
“you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000
years.”

By way of comparison, chipmaker AMD and computer builder Cray are currently
working with the US Department of Energy on the design of the world’s
fastest supercomputer, with 1.5 exaFLOPs of processing power. Dubbed
Frontier, AMD says the supercomputer will have as much processing power as
the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined.

When completed, Dojo is expected to be among the most powerful
supercomputers on the planet. But rather than performing advanced
calculations in areas like nuclear and climate research, Tesla’s
supercomputer is running a neural net for the purposes of training its AI
software to power self-driving cars. Ultimately, Musk has said Tesla will
make Dojo available to other companies that want to use it to train their
neural networks.

Earlier this year, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI, gave a presentation
at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, during
which he offered more details about Dojo and its neural network.

“For us, computer vision is the bread and butter of what we do and what
enables Autopilot,” Karpathy said, according to Electrek. “And for that to
work really well, we need to master the data from the fleet, and train
massive neural nets and experiment a lot. So we invested a lot into the
compute.”

OTHER ROBOTS?
Earlier this month, Dennis Hong, founder of the Robotics and Mechanisms
Laboratory at UCLA, tweeted a photo of a computer chip that many speculate
is the in-house hardware used by Tesla’s Dojo.

But Hong is an interesting figure for other reasons, too. He specializes in
humanoid robots and was a participant in the DARPA Urban Challenge which
kicked off the race for self-driving cars. (His team placed third.)

Asked on Twitter whether his lab was working with Tesla, Hong posted some
playful emojis but otherwise declined comment. We may learn more about how
Hong’s work and Tesla’s pursuits intersect during AI Day.

Musk has been forthcoming about his desires for Tesla to become more than
just a car company. “I think long term, people will think of Tesla as much
as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company,” he
said earlier this year.

THE FUTURE
A warning for anyone tuning in to the AI Day livestream: take Musk’s
predictions about near-term accomplishments with a massive grain of salt.
The things that will be discussed during this event are unlikely to have
any measurable impact on the company’s business in the months to come.

Self-driving cars are an incredibly difficult challenge. Even companies
like Waymo that are perceived to have the best autonomous vehicle
technology are still struggling to get it right. Tesla is no different.

“A key question for investors will be what the latest timeline is for
achieving full autonomy,” Loup Funds managing partner Gene Munster said in
a note. “Despite Elon’s ambitious goal of the end of this year, our best
guess is that 2025 will be the first year of public availability of level 4
autonomy.”

The rest of 2021 is already jam packed for Tesla. The company needs to open
factories in Texas and Germany. And it needs to tool up production for its
hotly anticipated Cybertruck, which has been delayed until 2022. Full
autonomy, such as it is, can wait.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/autonomousvehicles_nfbnet.org/attachments/20210819/abe02805/attachment.html>