Some notes on the Tesla AI demo day
by Rodolfo Rosini
The level of technical detail shown at demo day was really surprising. Tesla built their own infrastructure and chipsets for training, and based on their claims they outperform almost everyone including a lot of well funded startups (like seriously an entire class of neuromorphic startups are going to be wiped out by NVIDIA and Tesla based on what I have seen this year)
On computing power alone Tesla’s infrastructure would be the 5th largest supercomputer cluster in the world. Just really shows the difference between building a tech company (that happens to make stuff with wheels) vs other automakers dealing with a decaying portfolio of fossil fuel engines plus an inefficient dealer network
But the chipsets they designed have massive bandwidth, and they are using the data from the cars to train future models, and it’s really an AI-first company – I mean it has to be just that the rest of the industry hasn’t figured it out yet
Tesla is unstoppable in terms of how far away they are in terms of AI compared to any other carmaker
They also showed a robot with a bullshit dancer routine, and the genius of Musk is to make sure it got most of the press coverage (30k articles and counting) – while most of the journalists couldn’t really appreciate the level of sophistication of their computing infrastructure
However the robot is not too bullshit, and the 2020s is the dawn of the age of androids. Boston Dynamics could not find a market in the military, which is going to end up buying drones by the cartload instead (I expect autonomous drone warfare to become a separate branch of the military, or absorb the air force in the process). So all these robotics companies are going to sell for consumer and entertainment – just today there is an article about Disney also investing in robotics as well https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/business/media/disney-parks-robots.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
(we also have a company in this space at ConceptionX so keep an eye out for demo day in November)
Unclear wether they can really dominate personal robotics yet, probably not, but this will kickoff consumer interest, and start a new market that will have a massive impact (and to some extent easier than cars because using AI indoors is much easier)
I just wish all companies were investing this hard in future tech
Whilst in Arrakis 