Tesla’s Optimus robot prototype wasn’t the only thing the company shared at its AI Day presentation Friday night. Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy took the stage at Tesla’s AI Day to talk about how the company’s Full Self Driving software has improved. He revealed that there are now 160,000 customers using the beta software, compared to 2,000 around this time last year.
In total, Tesla says there have been 35 software versions of FSD. In a Q&A at the end of the presentation, Musk made another prediction — he’s already made a few — that the technology would be ready for a global rollout by the end of this year, but he acknowledged the hurdles in the field. of regulations and testing that were in place before that happened.
Then Paril Jain, Tesla’s technical leader for Autopilot motion planning, showed how FSD has improved in specific interactions and can make “human” decisions. For example, when a Tesla makes a left turn at an intersection, it can choose a trajectory that is not close to obstacles such as people crossing the street.
It is known that any Tesla can provide data sets to build the models that FSD uses, and according to Tesla’s engineering manager Phil Duan, Tesla will now start building and processing detailed 3D structures from that data. They said the cars also improve decision-making in various environmental situations, such as night, fog and rain.
Tesla trains the company’s AI software on its supercomputer and then sends the results to customers’ vehicles via wireless software updates. To do this, it processes video feeds from Tesla’s fleet of more than 1 million camera-equipped vehicles currently on the road and has built a simulator into Unreal Engine that is used to enhance Autopilot.
The automaker already has a large Nvidia GPU-based supercomputer and a data center with 30PB (that’s 30,000,000GB) of stored footage. Tesla is also working on a new custom-built computer with chips designed by Tesla called Dojo, which the company says will replace 72 GPU racks consisting of 4,000 GPUs with just four Dojo cabinets.
On last year’s AI Day, executives unveiled Dojo’s first chip and training tiles, which would eventually grow into an entire Dojo cluster, or “ExaPod.” Today, the company announced that the first ExaPod is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2023. The company plans to build a total of seven in Palo Alto. In a 10-box system, Tesla said the Dojo ExaPod would break the barrier of compute’s ExaFlop and hold 1.3 TB of high-speed SRAM and 13 TB of high-bandwidth DRAM.
Since last year’s AI day, Dojo’s development has reached a number of milestones, including installing the first Dojo cabinet, testing 2.2 MW of load testing, and now the company is operating at a build rate of one tile per day. day. Dojo was also demonstrated with a stable diffusion model with 25 Dojo stamps, creating this AI-generated image based on a prompt from “Cybertruck on Mars”.
All Tesla vehicles today come standard with a driver assistance feature called Autopilot. For an additional $15,000, owners can purchase the Fully Self-Driving option, which Musk has repeatedly promised will one day deliver fully autonomous capabilities to Tesla vehicle owners. To date, FSD remains a “Level 2” advanced driver assistance system, which means that the driver must remain fully involved in the operation of the vehicle while driving.
Currently available to approximately 160,000 drivers in the US and Canada, FSD gives users access to Autopilot’s partially automated driver assistance system on city streets and local roads. The system claims to accelerate and decelerate, make turns – including unprotected left turns, which are extremely difficult for automated systems – and recognize traffic signals and other road signs.
Tesla has come into conflict with the federal government over reports of FSD outages and other safety concerns. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating 16 accidents in which Tesla car owners using Autopilot crashed into stationary emergency vehicles, injuring 15 and killing one. Tesla faces a possible recall from Autopilot, FSD or both after the government upgraded its investigation earlier this year.
The company has been accused by regulators of false advertising and sued by customers for alleged deception about the capabilities of their vehicles. But FSD is also crucial to Musk’s vision of a driverless future. And Musk himself has so far largely avoided any serious consequences in his efforts to cover up the limitations of Tesla’s autonomous driving technology.
