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The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

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Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#41

Post by zdragnar »

jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

We could have possibly automated some existing rail, but I am not altogether certain that doing so would have lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency.

Actually laying the infrastructure for mass transit via rail is an entirely different league of cost from what has been dumped into self driving cars.

We have a hard enough time agreeing on how to do light rail transit in places that want it, and then actually getting it done.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#42

Post by danso »

I confess I have a reflexive skepticism to the idea that Tesla's achievements (and struggles) in car manufacturing would translate to any kind of lead in chip design and manufacturing. How long did it take Apple from planning to rollout for M1? And the Tesla chip seems to be making bigger revolution-sized claims?

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#43

Post by jeffbee »

justapassenger wrote: post #25

> Of this competition, only Google and Nvidia have supercomputers that stand toe to toe with the Tesla’s Even assuming that it's true (which I very much doubt - anyone that's willing to spend enough money with Nvidia, can have powerful supercomputer fairly quickly), it's very dishonest statement. It's comparing deployed system with a lab prototype of a single competent of potential supercomputer, that may be fully op…

It is really unreasonable to compare Tesla's photoshop mocks with hardware already deployed in the field today. Google already has a TPUv4 cluster that can train ResNet-50 in 13 seconds, which is ridiculous. Until Tesla publishes actual MLPerf benchmarks, you can assume that their ASIC game is at least as far behind Google's as their self-driving game is behind Waymo's: 5 years at a minimum.

https://github.com/mlcommons/training_results_v1.0/tree/mast...

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#44

Post by jvanderbot »

dragontamer wrote: post #39
jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliabl…

I wonder if, for the cost spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#45

Post by samstave »

jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions...

Which networking protocol best maps to this?

And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection...

I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campuses and report that back to the city...

And that's almost a decade old now...

So apply the same but report the data back to the traffic management system which is also trained on all the traffic patterns for a given intersection to best optimize for their patterns...

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#46

Post by jeffbee »

zdragnar wrote: post #41
jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

We could have possibly automated some existing rail, but I am not altogether certain that doing so would have lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency. Actually laying the infrastructure for mass transit via rail is an entirely different league of cost from what has been dumped into self driving cars. We have a hard enough time agreeing on how to do light rail transit in places that want it, and the…

A self-driving streetcar, that only has 1 degree of freedom, might be a practical problem to solve and maybe if it existed we would not have had to go through the 90-day outage of VTA light rail service that the Bay Area just experienced, an experience which in all likelihood killed VTA light rail forever.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#47

Post by atty »

baybal2 wrote: post #26
zaptrem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points on the robotaxi front, but there are many other problems that will totally benefit from a bigger training computer.

> many other problems that will totally benefit from a bigger training computer. I don't really think it's that many. The industry collectively sank untold billions into the blind belief that neural algorithms will somehow turn into "AI." 10 years later, no "AI," and not even a single money making niche use. Right now the industry is deep in sank cost falacy, and people who promised this, and that to investors are no…

As someone who works in the field, if your only conception of AI is a truly sentient intelligence, then yes, we are, as far as I can tell, nowhere near that. However, if by AI, you mean the use of sub domains of AI like machine learning or deep learning (where all the money has been spent), it’s quite literally all around us now, whether you realize it or not. At my company our deployment of “AI” techniques is ramping up year over year, not slowing down, and we’re seeing very good results. (And I work at a very old company, not a tech native. I can only imagine how much of Google’s or Facebook’s workflows and products include some sort of machine learning)

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#48

Post by samstave »

dragontamer wrote: post #39
jvanderbot wrote: post #37

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research , could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Mos…

> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliabl…

Remember that derailment/near derailment that happened when someone cut the electrical circuit connector cable on some rails, which then prevented the system for knowing where the train was?

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#49

Post by dragontamer »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
dragontamer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliabl…

I wonder if, for the cost spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out .

https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-c...

> On December 29, 2020, FRA announced that PTC technology is in operation on all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles, prior to the December 31, 2020 statutory deadline set forth by Congress.

We got that. We literally got that.

Re: The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, but There Are Some Major Technical Issues

#50

Post by scardycat »

This is a step in the right direction. I witnessed the semiconductor industry abandoning their own designs in favor of Intel/x86. Better diversity in chip design is always a good thing, even if its in closed ecosystems (Google TPU, Tesla Dojo)
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