Elon Musk has finally admitted that Tesla will be developing its own custom artificial intelligence chips in plans to speed up its self-driving plans.
Tesla will be developing the AI chips for its driverless cars range that are custom made for its specific fleet of vehicles.
To date, there have been no official details of the company’s plans with the chips, but at the NIPS Conference Musk told attendees that Tesla is “developing specialised AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world.”
“I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts,” said Musk, according to The Register. “We are developing custom AI hardware chips”.
Musk has reportedly admitted his worry around AI chips and whether it can operate safely within autonomous vehicles, but also believes there are many ways AI can be useful to businesses and users.
Reports earlier this year speculated that Tesla and Advanced Micro Devices were working together to develop AI chips for autonomous cars, but there seems to be no mention of the latter business in recent news.
Speculations said that Tesla had over 50 people working on the project including newly appointed Jim Keller. Keller is a well-known chip engineer and was appointed VP of Autopilot Hardware & Software Engineering at Tesla in 2016, looking at ways to develop the technology within the vehicles Tesla was planning to build.
– Tesla, AMD team up for AI chip development
– Government takes on self-driving initiative
– Competition heating up in autonomous vehicle market
If Tesla were to introduce its own specialised AI chip it could really set them apart in the quickly emerging autonomous vehicles market and AI, as more and more companies develop their own chips.
Apple and Huawei have developed their own chips in smartphones, whilst Google has powered its cloud AI services with its very own chip.
Specialise AI chips may help Tesla achieve the goal to be fully autonomous faster than it had planned, as more exact details of development are expected to emerge in due course.
