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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

#231

Post by Fricken »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #224
Fricken wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A bunch of details about their lidar came out in the depositions, and lots of juicy gossip about their internal politics, power struggles and backroom dealings. I don't recall reading anything about their compute.

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

#232

Post by ericpauley »

martythemaniak wrote: post #227
ericpauley wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Today Waymo sells me nothing

It's certainly not nothing

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

#233

Post by Piskvorrr »

haberman wrote: post #119
Fricken wrote: 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…

Oh, it's capable all right. Unless you actually try to use it anywhere that's not a perfectly spherical road in a vacuum, then it's also capable of killing you.

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

#234

Post by Piskvorrr »

majormajor wrote: post #131
xedeon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is "finding roads between two arbitrary cities" the hard part of self-driving?

That's navigation, and that's actually a solved problem. Actually following the roads...oh look, that's a nice set of traffic cones. What could that possibly mean? IDK, just continue through it.

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

#235

Post by Piskvorrr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #159
nbeleski wrote: post #86

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.

Fashion or not, the speed of light is not going anywhere - latency can only be added, never removed. If the choice is "process locally or receive stale data", it's not actually a choice.

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

#236

Post by brianchu »

haberman wrote: post #119
Fricken wrote: 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…

The interesting thing about the $3000 "upgrade" is that if you actually want to get it, I think you're better off taking the $3000 and investing it in Tesla.

Assuming autonomy is make or break for Tesla in the long term: if Tesla fails at it your stock will still be worth something (versus a useless upgrade). If Tesla succeeds you'll make more than enough to cover a retrofit.

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

#237

Post by acdha »

qaq wrote: post #59
acdha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More data points can hurt: it may just waste time processing data which doesn't improve results but it can actually make things harder if you're just adding more noise which has to be filtered out but there's no corresponding improvement in signal. As a simple example in a different domain, years back I found that the best way to improve Tesseract's OCR accuracy was to ensure that I didn't feed it images at more than…

My understanding is big problem is stationary objects which mostly get filtered out. With more processing power you might be able to do something about that.

My question is where the break-even point is between adding more resolution / frames-per-second versus performing more expensive analysis. Given that the human visual system is not especially high resolution or speed, I would bet that they're already at the point of diminishing returns on the sensor side and the big wins would come from more expensive processing techniques, which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17671843 supports.

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

#238

Post by nooknook »

deepGem wrote: post #58
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…

">By having its own silicone, Tesla can build for its own needs at its own pace ... " This is not what Musk said on the conference call. Surely some bonehead reporter is writing this. Musk said the latter, precisely to go from current 200 fps speed to something like 2000 fps (I might have the numbers wrong, but it's a 10x improvement) and that they have been doing this in stealth for the last 2-3 years. They expect t…

The board that was shipping since Oct 2016 is a drive px2 custom. Basically, a pascal gp106(gtx 1060 equiv) and a denver 2+cortex a57 cpu. I think hardware 2.5 added another parker chip. Figure $400-500 max per board.
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