Tesla has the best real-world AI team on Earth, says Elon Musk. It continues to develop self-driving technology, Optimus, and Dojo.
Tesla’s AI team continues to take the company to new heights. It is actively involved in the development of self-driving technology, Optimus, and Dojo. During the Q3 2023 Earnings Call, company management gave an update on these developments and their role in the company.
Elon Musk said that the FSD Beta fleet has already driven more than 500 million miles. He noted that this figure is growing rapidly as more and more vehicles participate in the program. Tesla recently completed building a 10,000 GPU cluster of H100s and Musk expects the company to get it into production faster than “anyone’s ever brought that much compute per unit time into production.” This must be done because training is a fundamental limiting factor to the full self-driving and autonomous vehicles that Tesla is aiming for.
Musk also noted that the company sees significant promise in version 12 of FSD. He explained that this is “end-to-end AI where it’s photon count in, controls out.” According to him, it can be thought of as “a large bitstream coming in and a tiny bitstream going out, compressing reality into a very small set of outputs, which is actually kind of how humans work. The vast majority of human data input is optics from our eyes. And so, we are like the car, photons in, controls out with neural nets, just neural nets in the middle. So, interesting to think about that.”
Tesla’s CEO said the company will continue to invest heavily in AI development because it is truly a game changer in the long term. According to Musk, this could potentially make Tesla the most valuable company in the world. Once Tesla achieves full self-driving, it will be able to use it in its cars and robots, which will have great scale and be incredibly useful.
Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja confirmed that the company’s operating expenses on research and development will continue to rise. He noted that in Q3 their rise was mainly related to Cybertruck prototypes, and pilot production testing, coupled with spending on artificial intelligence technologies such as full self-driving, Optimus, and Dojo.
Musk specifically praised the Tesla AI team, noting that it is one of the world’s best. He noted that it is the best in the world when it comes to real-world AI. “The Tesla AI team is I think one of the world’s best, and I think it is actually by far the world’s best when it comes to real-world AI. I’ll say that again, Tesla has the best real-world AI team on Earth, period, and it’s getting better,” said Musk.
The head of Tesla also drew attention to the fact that many people do not understand the profundity of the Tesla AI system. He said that at the moment, it is “basically Baby AGI. It has to understand reality in order to drive, Baby AGI.”
Musk described the company’s progress in artificial intelligence in the real world as a series of stacked logarithmic curves. He believes this is true for other parts of AI, such as LLM. “Each log curve is higher than the last one. So if you keep stacking them, keep stacking logs, eventually get to FSD,” he said.
