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Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

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Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#91

Post by Robotbeat »

dragontamer wrote: post #74
Robotbeat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia’s stuff is good but it’s pretty high margin. They don’t give access to it for cheap,& in the last five years, the cost per unit performance has been nearly flat. They’re also more generalized than Tesla needs. Performance advantages from process shrinks have also stagnated. A good time for a custom approach.

NVidia is claiming 1000 16-bit Tensor-FLOPS on Hopper: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-hopper-architecture... While Tesla is claiming less than 400 Tensor-FLOPS on D1. So yeah, the claims of NVidia's GH100 / Hopper GPU are an order of magnitude faster than the D1. Which is no surprise, because when your transistors are less than 1/2 the size of the competition, you can easily have 2x the performance in a emb…

The transistors aren’t always literally smaller with each processor node, and there are negative quantum effects that also occur as you shrink.

But anyway, you dodged my entire point about cost-to-performance ratio by looking just at performance. If NVidia is insisting on pocketing all the performance advantages of the process shrink as profit, then it still make sense for Tesla to do this.

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#92

Post by thunky »

rvz wrote: post #61
thunky wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the joke.

? My comment already agreed with it, and it plays right in to the entire point of you having to still pay attention and drive the car yourself. Hence why I said it is 'Fools Self Driving' Is this you as well? [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559771

No offense intended. I thought you were saying FSD meant that the car was supposed to drive itself, it just doesn't work very well (yet?). Where the joke was saying that FSD always meant that the human is the "self" and therefore FSD already works as intended.

Yes [0] was me as well. Apparently the poster was not being sarcastic.

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#93

Post by microtherion »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #32
cma wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Moon was supposed to be 2022. But he was supposed to land a manned dragon capsule on Mars in 2020 and before that 2018, plus passenger rocket flights from New York to Shanghai for between the price of a coach and business class ticket by 2028 (first made the claim in 2018, later doubled down on the 2028 date around 2020). https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/17/14652026/spacex-red-drago... Starlink satellites were su…

>California gave them almost a billion for "delivering" them. Source?

Edward Niedermeyer, "Ludicrous", Chapter 9, has a somewhat lower estimate:

“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80 percent of their range in under fifteen minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. [...] By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability. [...] For the 2015 to 2017 model years, CARB created a new rule requiring Tesla to actually document a certain number of battery swaps to prove that the capability was actually being used. This development just so happened to coincide with Tesla’s half-hearted “pilot program” and its subsequent decision that its customers had no interest in fast, convenient battery swaps. [...] By exploiting CARB’s fast-refueling rules, Tesla appears to have earned as much as $100 million in additional revenue by demonstrating and hyping a system it seems to never have intended to commercially deploy.”

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#94

Post by dragontamer »

Robotbeat wrote: post #91
dragontamer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVidia is claiming 1000 16-bit Tensor-FLOPS on Hopper: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-hopper-architecture... While Tesla is claiming less than 400 Tensor-FLOPS on D1. So yeah, the claims of NVidia's GH100 / Hopper GPU are an order of magnitude faster than the D1. Which is no surprise, because when your transistors are less than 1/2 the size of the competition, you can easily have 2x the performance in a emb…

The transistors aren’t always literally smaller with each processor node, and there are negative quantum effects that also occur as you shrink. But anyway, you dodged my entire point about cost-to-performance ratio by looking just at performance. If NVidia is insisting on pocketing all the performance advantages of the process shrink as profit, then it still make sense for Tesla to do this.

> But anyway, you dodged my entire point about cost-to-performance ratio by looking just at performance

"Dodged" ?? Unless you have the exact numbers for the amount of dollars Tesla has spent on mask-costs, chip engineers, and software developers, we're all taking a guess on that.

But we all know that such an engineering effort is in the 100-million+ project size or more. Maybe even $Billion+ size.

All of our estimates will vary, and the people who work inside of Tesla would never tell us this number. But even in the middle hundreds-of-millions, it seems rather difficult for Tesla to recoup costs.

-------

Especially compared to say... using an AMD MI250X or Google's TPUs or something. (Its not like NVidia is the only option, they're just the most complete and braindead option. But AMD MI250x have tensor cores as well that are competitive to A100, albeit missing the software engineering of the CUDA ecosystem)

------

Ex: A quickie search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959053

> For 7 nm, it costs more than $271 million for design alone (EDA, verification, synthesis, layout, sign-off, etc) [1], and that’s a cheaper one. Industry reports say $650-810 million for a big 5 nm chip.

How many chips does Tesla need to make before this is economically viable? And for what? They seemingly aren't even outperforming the A100 or MI250x, let alone the next-generation GH100.

What's your estimate on the cost of an all-custom 7nm chip with no compiler-infrastructure, no software support and 100% all manual software built from the ground up with no previous ecosystem?

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#95

Post by erulabs »

panick21_ wrote: post #76
_ea1k wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you personally sign a contract with Tesla for a battery swap station or something? I've found that a surprisingly large number of people are really committed to the idea that battery swapping is the only way that EVs could work. These are personally offended that Tesla abandoned it. But doing battery swapping well is much more capital intensive than their supercharger strategy was. They could never have afforde…

And people act like some Tesla scammed California by not rolling out the technology widely. But this was never a requirement of the grand. The whole point of such grants is to figure out if its a commercially viable solution or not, and it wasn't. Or at least not the best one.

Or, they take both positions simultaneously: The beta was rolled out recklessly but also they haven't delivered what they promised. Turns out self-driving is harder than people thought - and a few upper middle class folks like myself dropped 3k on something that isn't that useful. This occurs... millions of times a day with all sorts of products. What an absolute tragedy?

I'm actually glad they they've decided to slow down iteration on the self-driving stack - in the early days the self-driving would change behavior from patch to patch - it was extremely difficult to get an idea of what it would be thinking. It's obviously not the product that we all wished it was - but... does any product in the world hold up to consumer imagination?

Apple promises that the newest iPhone is a "new superpower". Am I supposed to believe that? Does anyone believe that? It never fails to crack me up that the folks most upset about Tesla's self-driving promise tend to not be customers and vow that they never will be. What in the world is so upsetting about a company over promising and under delivering? Are these people just constantly boiling with rage? Have they never experienced being a consumer before?

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#96

Post by seesaw »

killyourcar wrote: post #11
threatripper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk promising FSD by the end of the year - year after year - is one major thing that tarnished the Tesla image in my mind. I now assume that he has to believe that in order to avoid lawsuits. Maybe the same is with the computing infrastructure. They need to build it to show that they honestly believed it could work - even though they failed to deliver on their promises many times. That said, they do make progress an…

Musk is absolutely the reason I would never consider buying another Tesla, having just sold mine. Dude just straight up lies. He may not realize he's lying, but he lies constantly. Edit, because I'm getting downvoted. Here's some examples: self driving, battery swaps, robotic snake chargers, cybertruck windows, Bitcoin won't be converted to fiat, starlink speeds will improve, he will sell his home, first mars mission…

https://elonmusk.today/

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#97

Post by clouddrover »

erulabs wrote: post #95
panick21_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people act like some Tesla scammed California by not rolling out the technology widely. But this was never a requirement of the grand. The whole point of such grants is to figure out if its a commercially viable solution or not, and it wasn't. Or at least not the best one.

Or, they take both positions simultaneously: The beta was rolled out recklessly but also they haven't delivered what they promised. Turns out self-driving is harder than people thought - and a few upper middle class folks like myself dropped 3k on something that isn't that useful. This occurs... millions of times a day with all sorts of products. What an absolute tragedy? I'm actually glad they they've decided to slo…

You were scammed for $3,000 and you like it? I think you need to cultivate some self respect.

These days Tesla wants to con people out of $15,000:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/even-tesla-fans-think-fsds-pri...

Why should anyone "consume" this "product" when it simply doesn't work as claimed and doesn't meet any of Tesla's self declared deadlines?

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#98

Post by _ea1k »

itsoktocry wrote: post #79
_ea1k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once drove a Tesla on a road that was asphalt covered over what appeared to earlier be a concrete road. The concrete was visible through cracks in the top asphalt surface in straight lines. To a camera, they sort of looked like lane lines, but they were right down the middle of the lanes! I was manually driving, but the car was constantly freaking out because it thought I was running off the road. :lol Yes, it can…

> I was manually driving, but the car was constantly freaking out because it thought I was running off the road. :lol Yes, it can be a hard problem. If cracks in asphalt fooling the car's AI is a "hard problem", than full self-driving is doomed.

That's a really weird take, tbh. That particular case was one that _should_ have been easy, but wasn't. But I've also been on roads where the humans were confused because construction had messed up the lines so much.

TBH, getting a computer to navigate a parking lot is one of the hardest self-driving problems. That doesn't make them all doomed.

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#99

Post by _ea1k »

clouddrover wrote: post #97
erulabs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they take both positions simultaneously: The beta was rolled out recklessly but also they haven't delivered what they promised. Turns out self-driving is harder than people thought - and a few upper middle class folks like myself dropped 3k on something that isn't that useful. This occurs... millions of times a day with all sorts of products. What an absolute tragedy? I'm actually glad they they've decided to slo…

You were scammed for $3,000 and you like it? I think you need to cultivate some self respect. These days Tesla wants to con people out of $15,000: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/even-tesla-fans-think-fsds-pri... Why should anyone "consume" this "product" when it simply doesn't work as claimed and doesn't meet any of Tesla's self declared deadlines?

If I had been "scammed" out of $3k for "FSD", I'd be perfectly happy right now too. The existing highway features are worth about $3k to me.

I wouldn't pay $6k for EAP or $15k for "FSD" though.

Re: Tesla Dojo Custom AI Supercomputer at HC34

#100

Post by _ea1k »

panick21_ wrote: post #76
_ea1k wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you personally sign a contract with Tesla for a battery swap station or something? I've found that a surprisingly large number of people are really committed to the idea that battery swapping is the only way that EVs could work. These are personally offended that Tesla abandoned it. But doing battery swapping well is much more capital intensive than their supercharger strategy was. They could never have afforde…

And people act like some Tesla scammed California by not rolling out the technology widely. But this was never a requirement of the grand. The whole point of such grants is to figure out if its a commercially viable solution or not, and it wasn't. Or at least not the best one.

I feel like there is some ambiguity here. Tesla only allowed a limited number to use it and there are some signs that they weren't serious about it. They may have taken advantage of a loophole to gain more than they credibly should.
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