Elon Musk: Tesla’s AI Chip Project “Finally Coming To Fruition” After 3 Yrs

Elon Musk’s Electric vehicle company, Tesla is doing everything in power to stay afloat. In the past, we saw Elon Musk opening up about “sleeping on the floor” during the delayed production of the Tesla Model 3.

Amidst the turmoil faced by the company, Elon Musk has now confirmed that Tesla’s self-driving chip which was in development for nearly three years is “finally coming to fruition.” He revealed this development during Tesla’s earnings call conference for Q2 held on Wednesday.

Apart from being one of the few companies that are working on the self-driving technology, Tesla is also developing its own silicon for performing artificial-intelligence computations instead of relying upon AI systems from chipmakers like Nvidia.

According to Pete Bannon, one of the key members of the Autopilot self-driving team, the AI chips have already been tested out in the field, and the company has started dropping in replacements for Tesla Model X, S, and Model 3.

“They (new AI chips) support the current networks running today in the car at full frame rates with a lot of idle cycles to spare,” said Bannon at earning conference. He added that initially Tesla considered other options like Nvidia and Arm but they finally chose to create “a bottoms-up design from scratch.”

According to Musk, Tesla will invest more in the AI technology and also soon expand the chip team. Surprisingly, he says it will cost the same amount of money as the previously used Nvidia components but the homebaked chip will provide more processing power.

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