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

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

#111
post #8
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.

Better than a human aided by the best driver assistance technology

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

#112
post #4

> By having its own silicone Will this mistake never go away?

Only when everyone learns a major property of fake breasts isn't that they solve computational problems via the field effect.

I'm really hoping that some journalist will do a write up titled "Elon Musk Unveils His New Silicone."

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

#113
post #103
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tesla has it's own hardware platform. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know that was always going to happen because of power consumption, cost and performance ... so that they can create performance-intensive features that nobody else in the market yet has, because the off-the-shelf hardware won't allow it. Due to power consumption, cost and performance issues. And this custom hardware is being developed to solve…

Other people are going to be using inferencing chips soon too. Tesla might even just be basing it all on NVDLA (Nvidia's open source inferencing hardware targeted at self driving) and calling it their own.

Of course the competitors will follow. But Tesla will probably be first and a step ahead in the future, hence the talk about go-to-market speed.

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

#114
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Has a flight ever been brought down through a cyberattack? I've heard a lot of concern over that over the years, but (thank goodness) I don't recall any news of an actual flight being brought down.

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

#115
post #104
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to say for sure they are no where near full autonomy in their research although their current vehicles crashing into barriers and fire trucks obviously don't cut it.

If they were anywhere near full autonomy that LA-to-NYC demo they keep promising would have already happened.

Elon mentioned on the Q2 conference call yesterday that specific demo is easily doable.

He also added that it would be sort of cheating, because that's a very defined route and he prefers it to be able to be much more dynamic. i.e. pick any two US cites and the car will drive you there.

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

#116
post #38

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.

Collision aside, our insurance costs for liability / injury are lower for our 2017 Tesla than our 2014 Toyota.

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

#117
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…

It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency. If they succeed, it means slightly improved efficiency and cutting NVidia's profit margin out of their cost structure. If they fail, it would cost billions, and obscure chip bugs could put lives at risk. That risk/reward doesn't seem worth it unless you really know what you're doing…

"It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency."

This seems like the biography of Elon Musk's companies. He gets a crazy hard problem that people say he and his companies can not do, then he tries to implement it, often falling well behind and well short of the goalposts due to lack of foresight and overambitious scheduling. There were naysayers the whole way, including just as loud as there are now if not louder, and yet his companies' achievements and networth continue to climb.

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

#118
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.

Every time I see this typo I think of the company Silicon Knights which was just one letter away from sounding like the title to a porno film.

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

#119
post #45

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 learni…

I ordered a Tesla Model 3 yesterday. When I see the "Full Self-Driving Capability" checkbox at checkout time (it's an option you can pay $3,000 for right now) I just have zero confidence that they can deliver on this. Almost every other aspect of the car is fantastic. But Tesla's delusions about achieving full self-driving with their current approach just make me lose some respect for them. It makes me worried that they might be deluded about other things too.

I use the word "deluded" above realizing that I might be completely wrong. If they pull it off I'll eat crow and give them props. But I just don't see it happening.

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

#120
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being skeptical is fine, but it would be fair to back such a strong statement up with facts rather than completely ungrounded speculation.

This is not how verification works, generally. You have to prove your chip is correct.

I think his point is that you aren't backing up the statement that the chips are unverified. Nor does your statement that they are built for approximate workloads imply that the chips are unverified or cutting corners.
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