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Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
121–130 of 238 posts
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#122Right 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…
What is Waymo using? Custom ASIC?
Waymo's advantages include LIDAR and extremely detailed maps, IIRC. If I had to guess, those maps probably help them distinguish between roadside objects that happen to be static right now and ones that are really not going anywhere.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#123The 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.
Not quite... The chip was designed by Jim Keller, who was a key player in designing the highly successful AMD Zen architecture and Apple's A4 and A5 SoCs (pretty much a legend).
Jim is known in the industry as having an unquenchable thirst for really hard problems. Solves them, leave the company to recharge and goes on to the next company/project.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are a number of routes one can take to get from LA to NY. Elon is stalling because he knows that "Autopilot" isn't capable of making the trip.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Elon said the exact same thing in the Q4 2017 earnings call. And then said they would still do the demo in the next 3-6 months. It's been 6 months and this "easily doable" demo has still not been done. Tesla has shown zero evidence of their self driving program making any meaningful progress.
http://www.autonews.com/article/20180208/MOBILITY/180209770/...
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was quibbling about semantics. I am aware that cars can be dangerous. > and the damage it can cause on accident You are conflating (un)safety of a tool used in the way it is intended (kitchen knife = cutting a steak) with accidents (cutting a finger) and with malicious use (stabbing people). Those three categories are not the same for object-that-may-act-as-weapon and object-designed-as-weapon. Conflating them coll…
> So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? The latter two. > We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody quali…
I agree with your general sentiment overall.
I do not agree that neural networks are a "black box" with "no ability to inspect and verify". Even putting aside the many methods to understand what a neural network is doing without running it, at core, neural networks are well tested instruments. That's how they learn-- by testing themselves.
Obviously it's possible for a neural network to have odd behavior in circumstances not accounted for but that was always going to be possible at the level of complexity we're talking about here.
We're talking about cutting edge technology here -- and I agree with your general sentiment. I just don't agree with pinning the blame on "... based on neural networks". The same factors would apply to any codebase of this complexity.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It has already been demonstrated non-self-driving cars.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It's a lot harder to hack humans to do bad things I'd say, it's probably easier to hack individual humans, but - like everything in computing - hacking algorithms scales well, while human factors generally don't.
A thoughtful point.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#129>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…
>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…
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Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pilots have the ability to manually disengage airplane autopilots, and more importantly the time to do so (on the order of minutes). It's very different in a car, where the difference between life and death can be a split-second reaction.