Tesla’s move made absolutely no sense and it even cost the company the safety recognition by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). But new details from the company’s Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, shed at least some light into the automaker’s choice. During his presentation at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition on Monday, Karpathy revealed that the reason behind the vision-only autonomous driving approach is the company’s new supercomputer. Tesla’s next-gen supercomputer has 10 petabytes of “hot tier” NVMe storage and runs at 1.6 terrabytes per second, according to Karpathy. With 1.8 EFLOPS, he claimed that it might well be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world. Simply put, it apparently has insane speed and capacity. Regarding its function, Karpathy commented: The supercomputer collects video from eight cameras encircling the vehicle at 36 frames per second, which provides tremendous amounts of information about the environment surrounding the car. Elon Musk has been teasing a neural network training computer called “Dojo” for some time now.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2020 But Tesla’s new supercomputer isn’t Dojo, just an evolutionary step towards it, and Karpathy didn’t want to elaborate on the company’s ultimate computer project. Overall, we can now grasp better why Tesla turned to a camera-based system for its Autopilot. But even though the supercomputer’s abilities are impressive, I feel that the company took a big leap of faith, given that the neural network which collects and analyzes image data is still in an experimental stage. What’s most worrisome is that this experiment relies on actual human drivers, with unknown safety measures for them. If you’re interested in watching Karpathy’s full presentation, you can find it below. Do EVs excite your electrons? Do ebikes get your wheels spinning? Do self-driving cars get you all charged up? Then you need the weekly SHIFT newsletter in your life. Click here to sign up.
