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Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

techcrunch.com

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Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#21

Post by Nae3Au5x »

titzer wrote: post #3

This is pretty bad from a hardware/software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It's amazing that we're gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go >100mph, it doesn't matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a weapon .

In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation.

If we use a more narrow definition of weapon, e.g. a tool optimized for the primary purpose of injuring or killing people then it certainly is not a weapon.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#22

Post by chomp »

gallerdude wrote: post #6

The benefit they point out is 200fps vs. 2000fps, but is that actually that useful? In the post of OpenAO's robot, they said that improving the response times gave no significant gains. Only thing I can imagine would be allowances for wider and deeper neural nets.

>2000fps will provide a lot more wiggle room to do higher level computation on each frame.

Yeah I think this is it. My best guess, it's 200fps vs 2000fps for the same workload. As Tesla's data model gets larger and its computations get more complex, that 200fps will start to sag.

2000fps will provide a lot more wiggle room to do higher level computation on each frame.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#23

Post by AbrahamParangi »

gallerdude wrote: post #6

The benefit they point out is 200fps vs. 2000fps, but is that actually that useful? In the post of OpenAO's robot, they said that improving the response times gave no significant gains. Only thing I can imagine would be allowances for wider and deeper neural nets.

I bet the performance improvement with higher sampling frequencies is related to the percent of the input signal represented in the sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...)

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#24

Post by DmenshunlAnlsis »

Retric wrote: post #20
DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they admit that they need LIDAR too... Cha Ching! Various Autopilot accidents strongly imply that whatever the computer “brain” is doing doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have sufficient “eyes” to actually see things like a fire truck, cop car, or bollard.

They seem to have a rather low number of mistakes per billion miles,* so I don't know if more sensors are actually required. I suspect the larger issue is "To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/07/foul-computer/ The current model makes assumptions that sometimes turn out to be false. So yea it's not going to get to perfection, but level five only needs be…

That number always comes up, and it always needs to be said that a billion miles with driver assist and a billion miles under autopilot are not the same, and it’s a bogus figure. As to better than a human, it needs to be better than the humans who buy luxury sedans, sober, and awake. Better than a random selection of humans in a random selection of cars is no good. Conflating all vehicle deaths is like conflating all gun and knife violence; the average person on the streets of Chicago has far less risk of being shot than someone in a gang, or engaged in the commission of a felony. Yet you can make all of Chicago seem like a war zone by conflating the risks of different populations and dumping the raw statistics.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#25

Post by 3pt14159 »

titzer wrote: post #3

This is pretty bad from a hardware/software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It's amazing that we're gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go >100mph, it doesn't matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a weapon .

I worry less about software / hardware crashes leading to death and more about cyberattack. I've written about it before[0]: We need regulations before a mass breach of autonomous systems happens. Not after. This whole bullshit where corporations claim all sorts of things about their security then get owned trivially has happened for every OS and device out there. The supposedly secure QNX was installed into countless tanks, nuclear power plants, and autonomous devices before getting owned in 2017[1]. I don't buy this "just trust us" attitude from automotive and other autonomous manufacturers. One of them is going to fuck up at some point.

[0] https://www.zachaysan.com/cars and apologies for the length; it was a very stressful time in my life.

[1] http://support.blackberry.com/kb/articleDetail?articleNumber...

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#26

Post by twtw »

The most interesting question about this is what their motivation was to justify building an in-house ASIC design team. That isn't a super hard thing to do for a company of Tesla's size, but it is nontrivial and seems like a significant investment. It is probable that they got massive performance improvements by specializing their hardware, but it isn't clear that they couldn't have gotten the same perf improvement by upgrading to the next gen nvidia system (drive Xavier or something like that, the one with Volta + NVDLA).

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#28

Post by [deleted] »

ben174 wrote: post #8
titzer wrote: post #3

This is pretty bad from a hardware/software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It's amazing that we're gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go >100mph, it doesn't matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a weapon .

It only has to perform better than a human.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#29

Post by nikofeyn »

Ultimatt wrote: post #13
titzer wrote: post #3

This is pretty bad from a hardware/software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It's amazing that we're gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go >100mph, it doesn't matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a weapon .

Yeah because all the verified neural networks made from meat travelling >100mph are legit ok to drive 100% of the time. There are no road accident deaths to speak of.

there is something fundamentally different between a machine and human. how the brain operates is not well known, so to claim our brain is a neural network made of meat is just a guess.

the truth is, people have a lot of experience with other people. we can usually predict behavior of other drivers on the road, and can even predict pathological behavior or know how to handle it. that is a major point. when machines and software fail, they can fail in big, unpredictable ways. humans fail in fairly predictable ways. none of us have this experience with neural networks or machines.

i barely trust my computer to work on a daily basis, much less a vehicle.

and lastly, when a human is driving, fault is usually clearly and easily assignable. how fault is assigned in the case of machines driving is not clear at all.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#30

Post by Theodores »

melling wrote: post #12

“Nvidia’s hardware was handling about 200 frames per second, its specialized chip is able to do crunch out 2000 frames per second “with full redundancy and failover”.” What are the real-world benefits going from 200 to 2000 frames a second? 200 seems quite fast.

Nothing seems that fast at 50 m.p.h., however, excuse the mix in units, but each of those 200 frames is the equivalent of 10cm or so along the road. At 2000 frames per second then that is the equivalent of 1cm.

I don't make a habit of crashing cars but I did have one glancing head on crash, combined speeds around 125 m.p.h. and it was only centimetres that meant I did not wipe out that family and trash the car I was in.

As a consequence I would say that this 10x frame rate really is quite game changing, particularly for on-coming vehicles.

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