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1. Tesla for the forseeable future has the best self driving AI chip in the world for gathering the data requisite to solve the self driving problem at scale.
by meekstro 7y ago
1. Tesla for the forseeable future has the best self driving AI chip in the world for gathering the data requisite to solve the self driving problem at scale.
2. Musk has investors and the price of his cash financing goes up when people short his stock and there is negative sentiment. It was a major strategic weakness when the viability of tesla depended on short-term cashflow financing and he did what he had to save the company that he poured his life savings into. Not so much now that he's built a system where every additional vehicle sold adds additional value and long-term investors can see that. Musk thinks long-term the markets think short-term but if you run out of cash, there is no more planning and he hates the markets lack of vision and people profiting from negative sentiment effectively killing optimum solutions. The market has a lot of long-term faith in Amazon and Google and Microsoft because of their dominant networks and economies of scale and profit from complex software with zero marginal cost.
3. Solving problems in sub optimal ways isn't solving them it's compromising on them. He solves them optimally with the least capital but admits his mistakes, one of which was not judging the benefit of humans and teamwork on production lines versus robotic manufacturing technology correctly. If you are generating negative externalities you aren't reducing entropy in the system and Tesla learnt this painfully and won't forget it.
4. I'm completely out of my depth on the data scientists employer preference but if I had the choice of solving problems from a constantly growing ocean or from an artificial fishpond and I had a desire to contribute majorly to solving the autonomous driving problem and I had to factor in the probability of earning enough money to buy my time freedom as quickly as possible then the data is suggesting that Tesla at this point in time is a reasonable bet.
The question is whether he can compete with Toyota on mass scale while battery tech comes down in price but he's quite lucky Toyota misbet on fuel cells and don't readily admit their mistakes, it appears he's built a 10 year lead on the autonomous driving and can compete in the high end of the electric market profitably. The first question anyone would ask a driver of an electric BMW is why they didn't choose a Tesla? That's a fairly strong position, I wouldn't be shorting that stock.
The entrenched car lobby have only have two lines of defense left. The first which was to short him so he runs out of access to cash from negative sentiment is virtually broken on Tesla's current revenue and IP acceleration. The last line will be a delaying argument over Safety but he has a much larger dataset.
Geico falls when Tesla proves safe autonomy. There is a lot at stake here and Musk has focused primarily on the physics which is the right thing to focus on for humanity.
- Traster 7y agoThis is just ridiculous. Is there a better chip to process the exact image depth & resolution with the exact layers and co-efficent accuracy that Tesla uses? No. Does that make it the most advanced AI chip in the world? No! In fact, frankly, you're trying to have a technical discussion about a bullshit term. Tesla isn't producing an AI chip, they're producing a scalar product chip. It does a 96x96 Mult-add and that's basically it. How does it do on any of the standard AI benchmarks? Oh it can't run any of them because it's not got support for any of them because it lacks many of the basic features of what any normal person would consider a chip capable of doing AI work. It is the best chip to run the convolutions and pooling of 1 neural net that Tesla thinks it will want to run. It's the best 'AI' chip in the same way that the chip Nokia produces for it's mobile backhaul is the best 'neworking' chip. The point is that the chip they're trying to compare their custom ASIC to is capable of running several AI frameworks none of which the ASIC can. Hell it can't even run single precision floating point operations. Tesla has the best chip in the world for the one neural network they want to run. I bet you good money their custom ASIC sucks at running Waymo's AI workload.
- meekstro 7y agoI apologise for using the term AI and sounding ridiculous. Sorry to you and everyone else who had to read that you are right. "Tesla has the best chip in the world for the one neural network they want to run" is what I wanted to convey but don't actually have the technical background to do it. "Frankly you're trying to have a technical discussion about a bullshit term" You are right. I apologise for diluting the discussion and will go back to reading hacker news not creating it. I love this site and don't want to dilute it.