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Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Building Dedicated Chips For Autopilot (theregister.co.uk)
Elon Musk says Tesla is developing its own chip to run the Autopilot system in future vehicles from the firm. The news was revealed at a Tesla party that took place at the intelligence conference NIPS. Attendees at the party told The Register that Musk said, "I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts. We are developing custom AI hardware chips." From the report: Musk offered no details of his company's plans, but did tell the party that "Jim is developing specialized AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world." "Jim" is Jim Keller, a well-known chip engineer who was lead architect on a range of silicon at AMD and Apple and joined Tesla in 2016. Keller later joined Musk on a panel discussing AI at the Tesla Party alongside Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's Director of AI and chaired by Shivon Zilis, a partner and founding member at Bloomberg Beta, a VC firm. Musk is well known for his optimism about driverless cars and pessimism about whether AI can operate safely. At the party he voiced a belief that "about half of new cars built ten years from now will be autonomous." He added his opinion that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive in about seven or eight years.
I expect these to be less general purpose than Google's offerings. The EV industry doesn't need to train nets in-vehicle and has to be concerned with power consumption. The traditional vector FPU approach to AI is power hungry, many orders of magnitude more so than the human brain. So, we know there is room for improvement.
Something in the direction of IBM's TrueNorth chip which initially had problems with convolutional neural nets but can now handle them might be better.
In any case, I hope that Elon's allusions mean that a different approach is being taken - something between Google's TPU and IBM's TrueNorth. AMD would be eager to throw in some of their own funds if the development could be marketed to others perhaps after some delay. Elon is usually amenable to spreading the tech.