Today, Tesla is holding their latest event, AI Day. Unlike a product launch, it is expected this day is similar to other technology demonstrations like Battery Day (Sept 23, 2020), or Autonomy Day (Apr 23, 2019).
Today’s event will be focused on showcasing how Tesla is leveraging AI to enable them to create autonomous cars and deliver Full Self Driving. As stated previously, Tesla expects that by solving autonomy, they can create a robotaxi network of cars and while they’re late on the software side.. expected a million on the road by 2020, when it comes to the hardware they’re well-positioned.
By the time the software is ready, they’ll have well in excess of a million cars on the road capable of receiving the OTA update to enable full self-driving.
Since Autonomy Day, we’ve seen a number of presentations and podcasts, from Elon Musk and Andrej Kaparthy where they discuss the challenges around solving real-world AI.
Musk has said today’s focus is really a recruiting drive for the best AI experts to come work for Tesla. That does suggest one of two things. It is possible they still have significant challenges remaining to deliver autonomy and need new expertise to help solve it, or that new AI recruits would assist Tesla to apply AI to new areas of their business.
With a goal of scaling up battery and vehicle production dramatically over this decade, it’s likely that we hear Tesla discuss their application of AI on production optimisation to increase volume, reduce errors and cost.
Part of today’s event is going to be the unveiling of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer. This training computer processes video captured by vehicles of events out in the world, to enable the Computer Vision model to improve. Tesla speaks of this concept of a data engine, that they can essentially define a problem, request data from the fleet, crunch the training to build the model that gets delivered to the fleet via a software update.
With more compute (from Dojo), the theory is that Tesla will be able to increase the rate at which they solve the driving problems outstanding and tackle the corner cases. To date, it seems Tesla has used off-the-shelf hardware from other manufacturers, but as they did with the HW3 chip in the car, designing a chip, specifically dedicated to the task of training, should offer dramatic performance improvements.
You can watch Tesla’s AI Day below from 10AM AEST on 20/08/2021.
Media and investors are not invited to the event, however, we have learnt that a couple of Tesla podcasters, Rob Maurer and Ryan McCaffrey did get invites. Maurer has posted some photos from outside the event, revealing that the unreleased Cybertruck is on show.
Dennis Hong recently became a name in the Tesla community as he was the first to share the graphic above, from the Tesla invite. Why would he be invited, well it seems his research in robotics, may be of interest to Tesla, or Tesla’s AI may be being used by Hong’s team.
