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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

#221
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.

I think you're right if you look at things from a statistical perspective but I don't think it's going to end up actually working out like that.

A person can explain "why" they did something when an accident happens. I've spent a lot of consulting hours helping unwind the "why" of ML/AI models, and we bill regardless of whether we can actually find that answer.

Putting aside by personal bias that I think Tesla is functionally incapable of doing anything well, lets pretend they deploy FSD - I think the fact that in that 1 accident to every 100+ human accidents you can't find "why" will override the fact that there are xx% less accidents.

Just from my experience consulting in healthcare and working with actuaries during the Obamacare debates and modeling out the impact of that -- people just honestly aren't open to statistical arguments when it comes to human life or emotional issues.

(Not saying they're wrong, me and my wife completely disagree about so many issues where it's emotions vs statistics, I think she has a very valid point on many of those - what I'm trying to say is this is going to be a philosophical debate more than a statistics debate so Tesla should gear up accordingly).

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD. Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. T…

Waymo is very close to wide availability of self driving hire cars in Phoenix: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) At any but very close distance, don't humans mostly use a combination of lighting cues, a priori knowledge of actual size vs. apparent size, motion parallax, and other flat-image cues instead of stereoscopy? But, yeah, LIDAR cuts through all that, too.

You can use stereoscopic using the full width of the car as the baseline instead of eye distance. Humans have a pupillary distance of about 60mm which is good for about 10 meters (possibly much more: https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191614 ). A Model 3 is over 6 feet in width, so the pupillary distance is thus 30 times that of humans, and so should be good to about 300 meters, which is comparable…

Waiting for someone to state that last point. Lidar is still not cheap enough.

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

#224
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Waymo using? Custom ASIC?

Waymo pretty top-secret about their hardware, so I'm not sure. I would venture to guess that if they don't have a custom ASIC yet they're working on one. I know they had Intel FPGAs and it's a safe bet they've integrated Google's tensor core architecture.

Wasn't a bunch of stuff declassified during their lawsuit with Uber?

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD. Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. T…

Only one of the companies you mentioned currently has cars on the road with self driving tech that can kill you.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD. Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. T…

Only one of the companies you mentioned currently has cars on the road with self driving tech that can kill you.

Cadillac's CT6? Yeah, I speed away every time I see one.

But there's no need to pick on GM, they all have self-driving tech capable of killing you.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD. Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. T…

Waymo is very close to wide availability of self driving hire cars in Phoenix: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

Yes, various companies are in varying states of readiness in various jurisdictions.

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

#228

what does he mean with regards to GPUs and CPUs "emulating"? they are computation machines doing computations. an algorithm running on one or the other isn't emulating anything in this context. running on "bare metal" is just an optimization along a certain axis. it isn't any more real of a computation. and talking about this now seems like another desperate attempt at generating hype.

As a naive example, if in a CPU you are doing some specific 3-step algorithm which would normally require 3 clock cycles, you can instead bake that algorithm into a circuit along with the memory it needs that will run in 1 cycle. In Elon's terminology, the CPU has to "emulate" what the baked-in circuit simply is. But from the sounds of it this chip goes beyond that. It sounds like some kind of RAM/GPU hybrid with mat…

what i was getting at that the term "emulation" is rarely used, at least from my experience, in this context except in cases where something is truly faking it like game emulation, OS emulation, hardware emulation, etc. i personally feel like musk is using this term as a marketing and hype technique, that all of the sudden CPUs and GPUs are "faking it" for these applications.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a number on embedded processors and controllers in cars today, including systems responsible for critical operational parts of the car. How autonomous systems will make anything different? Why do you believe people aren't currently hacking cars? I don't intend to be critical at all, I believe this is a very interesting point too that should be discussed. (I hope to check the links on my interval).

> How autonomous systems will make anything different? Why do you believe people aren't currently hacking cars? Part of the reason is that, in current ecosystem, companies will find ways in which self-driving requires being constantly on-line and connected to vendor's server. Off-line processing is not in fashion these days.

Off-line processing is absolutely in fashion with SDCs. Can't quickly react to a pedestrian jumping in front of your car when you have to bounce 12 1080p video streams to a AWS server.

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

#230
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 t…

>>It makes me worried that they might be deluded about other things too.

Tesla will fail. But they will fail at 5% of their goals, and achieve 95% of that goals. It will still be called 'Failure'.

To avoid that 'Failure' tag, other companies won't even try.

Do this process enough number of times. And it will appear like Tesla is failing all the time, and yet achieving almost 100% more than other companies.

The problem here is in defining success in terms of binary outcomes of success and failure.

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