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Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Building Dedicated Chips For Autopilot (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the do-it-yourself dept.

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.

32 comments

  1. What he didn't tell you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Was that he was actually having a problem with the worry of people just using a jtag to the flash the memory chip and rewrite the autopilot software to crash someone then blame it on him.

    Instead, he kidded a good person to learn that through another person's struggle.

    What he's really doing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_read-only_memory because that's really the only way you can (other than heavier than fields of energy) secure things.

    Then you just do the same thing with the key, which holds the encryption key to allow the "custom made chip" (which is really just a bunch of gates).

    The fact is, the dude is not original and doesn't deserve what he has.

    You can probably just say that to walk in to Tesla and get a job though.

    Shit runs it's course I guess.

    1. Re:What he didn't tell you. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      ...what?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:What he didn't tell you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tesla's AI crying for help

    3. Re:What he didn't tell you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...what?

      I can’t abide these humans. Disgusting creatures.

    4. Re:What he didn't tell you. by burtosis · · Score: 1

      Its an AcId post.

  2. The proliferation of AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The proliferation of these AI bots commenting on the internet is not a good sign.

    Was that he was actually having a problem with the worry of people just using a jtag to the flash the memory chip and rewrite the autopilot software to crash someone then blame it on him.

    Instead, he kidded a good person to learn that through another person's struggle.

    What he's really doing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... because that's really the only way you can (other than heavier than fields of energy) secure things.

    Then you just do the same thing with the key, which holds the encryption key to allow the "custom made chip" (which is really just a bunch of gates).

    The fact is, the dude is not original and doesn't deserve what he has.

    You can probably just say that to walk in to Tesla and get a job though.

    Shit runs it's course I guess.

  3. ADHD... by Chas · · Score: -1

    Seriously. This fucker has projects literally falling off his plate as it is.

    He just had to fire a bunch of people.

    And now he's dicking around with chip manufacturing?

    COME ON!

    Someone give him some fucking Adderall!

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
    1. Re:ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      You are a fucking moron, he's a cunt.

      The guy who needs adderall is wondering why those girl's cannot talk anymore. Oh yea, it's cause of cunts like Musk.

    2. Re:ADHD... by Jfetjunky · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While I don't disagree he's got stuff coming out of his ears, I seriously doubt he is getting the semi-fab business. In this case, likely an ASIC, it will probably be designed by an outside firm and fab'd by one of the many contract fabs available.

      If there are dedicated functions or custom designs it can certainly make sense to drop the investment to develop one if you expect volumes to be high.

    3. Re:ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I expect the volume of Elonic handwaving to distract investor attention away from the turtle speed Model 3 assembly line to be high.

    4. Re:ADHD... by RhettLivingston · · Score: 2

      Tesla is likely working with AMD on this. It was reported a couple of months ago.

    5. Re:ADHD... by Rei · · Score: 2

      More specifically: Tesla's biggest challenge with improving Autopilot is processing power; this was discussed a month or two ago. With a car, you can't offload something like that to the cloud, since you can't trust in 100% unbroken connectivity. But better capabilities requires neural nets, for image recognition tasks (you can't decide how to respond to something if you can't recognize what you're seeing) - and neural nets are extremely computation-intensive. They've been working (and having success) at reducing the processing power for the nets they want to deploy, but news like this doesn't surprise me at all. The more processing power they can deploy, the better the results they'll be able to get. And neural nets should lend themselves very well to custom hardware.

      --
      Pinkypants -- my favorite!
    6. Re:ADHD... by Rei · · Score: 1

      Meanwhile, the second round of config invites to non-Tesla/SpaceX Model 3 customers just went out, and the first round's deliveries start in the first few days.

      --
      Pinkypants -- my favorite!
    7. Re:ADHD... by Botnet-of-People · · Score: 1

      I agree. Developing a technology in-house might protect a company from the greater uncertainty that comes from an outsourced design. They can more rapidly build around the technology's strengths or shortcomings. Autonomous navigation has become one of Tesla's major selling points, besides the battery-powered engines, so designing a custom chip (aka ASIC) for its Autopilot system actually makes sense, even if they decide to sell it independently of the vehicle, since the design & engineering are already a sunk cost. Now if Tesla were to build an electric plane, that might qualify as corporate ADHD (but not for Elon's other company, SpaceX)

    8. Re:ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, Musk is the one that's getting everything wrong.

      Whereas Chas (5144), the billionaire technology industrialist and playboy, can always put the likes of Musk in his place.

    9. Re:ADHD... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Some people over at the TMC forums have been extracting data from Tesla cars, so we know quite a bit about the current state of their system.

      They have cameras that do black and white plus a red channel. I guess red for road signs. They have neural networks looking at the images. They are quite primitive though, and have some severe limitations.

      For example, they only look at one frame at a time. That means no depth perception. You need either two cameras or two frames separated by time for that, and in the latter case it doesn't work while you are stationary.

      It really looks like they underestimated the difficulty of doing full self driving with just cameras and no lidar. The level of AI needed to navigate around a car park with just cameras and ultrasonics, for example, seems beyond anything anyone is doing right now. They could fudge it but then Tesla cars will be easy to hurd and prone to getting stuck without a driver. Wouldn't want your kids getting robbed by thrives with spray paint.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      While I don't disagree he's got stuff coming out of his ears, I seriously doubt he is getting the semi-fab business. In this case, likely an ASIC, it will probably be designed by an outside firm and fab'd by one of the many contract fabs available.

        If there are dedicated functions or custom designs it can certainly make sense to drop the investment to develop one if you expect volumes to be high.

      Perhaps you missed the point that he specifically hired a chip designer? It's quite possible it'll be fabricated by contract, but Jim Keller's designing it.

    11. Re:ADHD... by ColaMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Wouldn't want your kids getting robbed by thrives with spray paint.

      Lots of things can wreak havoc with just about every navigation approach that self-driving cars can use.

      - Spray paint on cameras if you're using optical recognition.
      - Same can be done with lidars, and there hasn't been much talk of the interference you get with multiple lidars in view of each other.
      - Radar sensors can be stopped with mylar party balloons or anything metallic.
      - Ultrasonic sensors can be stopped with just cardboard, or even chewing gum on the sensor.
      - A metallic blanket thrown over the top of a car can stop GPS (eg, an alfoil windscreen sunshade that you can buy for $2, if you place it in the right spot).

      Thinking about that, I reckon you could get a big painter's drop sheet, spray it with metallic paint, weight the corners, and then you would have effectively made a large "net" that you could use to catch self-driving cars for fun and profit.

      So what's left? Hopefully a pop-out joystick that an occupant can grab and drive the car with when it all goes pear-shaped.

      --

      You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
      There is a lot of hype here.
    12. Re:ADHD... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Tesla is likely working with AMD on this. It was reported a couple of months ago.

      Also, these AI ASICs are not that complicated. They are just a big array of FP16 or FP8 multipliers with a really wide data path. Sort of like a low precision GPU with all the graphics features removed.

      Google already makes their own but they don't sell it, it is for internal use only. They used it for AlphaGo, and they also use it for image processing.

    13. Re:ADHD... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      If you look at Google's self driving cars, they use lidar and cameras to build up a 3D model of the world around them. Tesla is either planning to do that just with cameras, or hopes it doesn't need to.

      Lidar can tell a poster from an actual object. Cameras alone... It will be like those Road Runner cartoons where Wylie Coyote paints a fake tunnel mouth on a wall.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    14. Re:ADHD... by RhettLivingston · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    15. Re:ADHD... by Jfetjunky · · Score: 1

      Good point!

    16. Re:ADHD... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      "Tesla's biggest challenge with improving Autopilot is processing power"
      Not so sure. Their AP1.0 system from Mobileye is vastly inferior in terms of raw power yet AP2.0 is still not at feature parity

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    17. Re: ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why does this have anything to do with AMD?

    18. Re: ADHD... by RhettLivingston · · Score: 1

      They will be building these chips for Tesla.

    19. Re:ADHD... by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      The EV industry doesn't need to train nets in-vehicle

      They still need to train them in their labs, which will definitely benefit from the same technology.

    20. Re:ADHD... by mikael · · Score: 2

      He probably means the design of chips rather than the actual fabrication. Anything vision related is more DSP than CPU or GPU. In the past, chips like the TMS320x0 series or i860's were used, but nothing beats a custom ASIC with all the unused instructions stripped out and new custom instructions added.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    21. Re:ADHD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Um. Tossing a tarp over the windshield also causes issues for non-self-driving cars.

  4. Too far by Neuronwelder · · Score: 2

    I'm really beginning to suspect that his ego has gotten full control of his mind.

    1. Re:Too far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a culture we have become accustomed to mediocrity. Anyone showing genuine ambition is met with scepticism, anger and envy.

    2. Re:Too far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't worry AC. I'm with you on this one. It always struck me that there is something dismissive and harmful that comes along with the claim that someone is a narcissist/has-a-big-ego/etc. This dude's actually trying to make the world a better place, and is winning. I don't respect those criticisms in such circumstances.

    3. Re:Too far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed. Granted, if there were a legitimate thought or argument behind 'this guy has an ego', maybe it would be considered.