Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by new299 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

twtw wrote: post #26

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 b…

Because it's expensive.

If you have your own ASIC it's a differentiator that's hard for other players to compete with. They'll take this to potential investors (or stockholders the "market") and say this is a big expensive thing we have that nobody else has. It's expensive and time-consuming for them to replicate and we also own a lot of IP that they would need.

You and I might know it's bullshit. That's not true of the investment market in general.

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

#42

Post by colordrops » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

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 .

This is pure unmitigated FUD. Do you have a comment on the actual content of the article?

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

#43

Post by slivym » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

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 .

No it isn't. There are already standards in electronics for Functional safety and these chips will have to abide by them. Part of that is that there'll be fail-safe chips that are fully ASIL-D compliant, and the full system will be ASIL-D classified as well. The difficult part of this problem is the hardware, not the functional safety - we've got that pretty much well defined by now.

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

#44

Post by planteen » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

slivym wrote: post #35

>By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own pace. If they suddenly recognize something the hardware is lacking, they’re not waiting on someone else to build it. It’s by no means a trivial task — but if they can pull it off without breaking the bank (and Elon says it costs them “the same as the current hardware”), it could end up being a significant strength. I outright snorted at this. T…

They have also conflated silicon and silicone, which is humorous.

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

#45

Post by Fricken » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

Right now, with HW2 Tesla is in kind of an awkward no man's land where their hardware is overkill for basic ADAS, but nowhere near enough for any kind of autonomy that allows the driver to turn their attention away from the driving task.

By going to a custom ASIC with inferencing. I have little doubt about Musk's claim that it'll offer a 10x improvement over the current stripped down PX Drive2 variant for deep learning tasks. If I'm to decrypt Musk's branded terminology and take him at his word, then they'll be going from about 8 TOPS to 80 TOPs with that they'll be able to get even deeper into the no man's land that's even more overkill for basic ADAS but still not nearly enough to handle full self driving safely in all conditions, though maybe they'll get L3 highway out of it.

Nvidia's upcoming Pegasus board will supposedly do 320 TOPS, and their competitor, Intel/Mobileye's EyeQ5 will likely have comparable specs. These motherboards are designed to replace Robotaxi trunks brimming with ~$150k in liquid cooled compute that draw 3-4000 watts.

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

#46

Post by slivym » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #37

Can future gen GPUs bridge the gap? The NVIDIA CEO seemed really confident when asked previously about the challenge that specialized AI chips posed. Is his confidence misplaced/just bluster or what?

The hardware platform for self-driving cars isn't just Sensor -> AI Chip -> Steering wheel. There will be custom chips for accelerating some of the hardest parts of the algorithm, but there's no reason not to think there'll be a significant Nvidia chip in there too.

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

#47

Post by mhneu » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #25

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 countles…

YES. Security compromise is the huge achilles heel of self-driving cars - and anything that is algorithmically controlled.

When you have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road, and someone figures out how to hack them, and drive them simultaneously into crowds, that will be a BIG BIG problem.

And this problem isn't just about self-driving cars. It is a fundamental issue with all algorithms. It's a lot harder to hack humans to do bad things (although it can be done with sustained messaging and propaganda). But algorithms can be compromised and exploited.

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

#48

Post by simion314 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #38

simion314 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They seem to have a rather low number of mistakes per billion miles I am curious on what numbers are you basing this on, the Tesla PR numbers are not valid statistics.

> what numbers are you basing this on I trust insurance companies to have good data, they think it improves safety when you compare rates.

But you are referring at current Teslas ?

This cars require the driver to pay 100% attention, by law and by Tesla agreements so isn't obvious that driver+drive assist+expensive car has better average numbers then driver + average (maybe old) car ?

I would like to see the numbers of how many times a driver had to intervene to save the situation

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

#49

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

slivym wrote: post #35

>By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own pace. If they suddenly recognize something the hardware is lacking, they’re not waiting on someone else to build it. It’s by no means a trivial task — but if they can pull it off without breaking the bank (and Elon says it costs them “the same as the current hardware”), it could end up being a significant strength. I outright snorted at this. T…

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by bonestamp2 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

chomp wrote: post #22

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.

This is exactly right. They didn't mention it in the article, but I was on the call and Elon stated that one of the main benefits was that they could now process all of the camera images at full resolution and full framerate (implying they can't do that with the GPU).