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Tesla AI Day Live Stream [video]

64 points by jonbaer 5y ago

sremani 5y ago
There is a wow factor in the presentation, especially how many of the things they are making from ground-up and in-house, at times making me feel like, may be they want to be AI company now. Definitely the TSLA stock price increase is being reflected into the massive investments into AI.
- avelis 5y ago
  Stock price will likely not go up the day after. Analysts have to break down the implication in terms of potential revenue models that Tesla could gain for it. From there we can establish a future price target based on potential revenue. For now the market wants to focus on revenue today, that is mostly sold products today and near term products soon to be available.
  - sremani 5y ago
    What I meant was, given the meteroic rise in the past years increase in valuation - Tesla took a lot of capital and invested in this division.
- tenpies 5y ago
  > Definitely the TSLA stock price increase is being reflected into the massive investments into AI. Actually the best indicator of stock price increase has been if an unknown buyer comes in an buys huge amounts of OTM calls expiring that week with the hope of causing a gamma squeeze. Watch the option flow. You'll note also that it just hasn't been the same since Archegos imploded for example, but there is definitely another smaller buyer doing the same. It's almost certainly a group effort given the amount of money at play.
aantix 5y ago
What’s the biggest advancement/feature, in your opinion?
- 6d6b73 5y ago
  You mean biggest fraud? Tesla Bot of course
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cogman10 5y ago
  Dojo. Because it's real and pretty impressive. It shows Tesla has some pretty good hardware chops.
maxdo 5y ago
I've been watching their presentations from time to time. The progress they maid within 1-2 years is incredible. They clearly focused a lot and betting a lot on their approach. Wouldn't be surprised if they'll become a real waymo competitor in 1.5 year. Saying"competitor" I mean real application of robotaxi but with major some issues. Waymo's approach still failing a nose cones on the road for example.
- AppleCandy 5y ago
  How does Tesla's tech compare with Waymo? I just can't imagine how Waymo or any other company can compete with the first-principles full stack engineering and scaling of Tesla, which touches virtually every important dimension of consideration. And that is today, not even a year from now. The foundation Tesla has built and shown on AI day will progressively increase their lead in the years to come, I just don't see how anyone can compete with that level of forward thinking. To me it just seems obvious, so what am I missing about Waymo?
  - criticaltinker 5y ago
    I've been told the consensus on HN is that Waymo is far ahead of Tesla in terms of tech. See this post & discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236964
  - raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    Waymo and everybody else are only trying to solve one AI problem. Tesla wanted to tackle two at the same time. Maybe they can do it, but its just an extra hurdle that others are stepping around. Also Waymo has had level 4 deployed for years.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      In geofenced customizer non consumer cars? Tesla/musk self driving claims require extensive independent verification, as do the other fsd wannabes (they are all wannabes right now). I still would like primary focus on highway driving and safety. That is the big efficiency win for logistics and slot easier than urban streets
bko 5y ago
The newly announced Tesla humanoid bot is around 2:05:11. Expected prototype in 2022. The demo was an obvious troll but it looks pretty exciting. I'd rather have resources put into actual innovation than learning how to increase the likelihood someone will click a button by 0.01% https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7511 https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7511
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I had the tv on last night, and woke up thinking Musk made a huge advancement in robotics.
criticaltinker 5y ago
Previous discussion from 13 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240882
- 6d6b73 5y ago
  That discussion was already pushed off the first page, probably because too many people now see Musk for the fraud he is. < Bracing for down votes from Tesla Bots > :)
  - cardosof 5y ago
    I see this opinion over and over again, but I don't know the reasons sustaining it, so I will ask: why is he a fraud? Are his companies fraudulent as well or just their iconic leader/founder?
    - misiti3780 5y ago
      this sums it up from three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997438
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      People have been expressing this skepticism for many years and every time there's a groundbreaking accomplishment the goalposts get moved. At what point are we able to admit that he's the most accomplished CEO since Steve Jobs? I personally thought the rocket reusability sounded far-fetched and doubted the Model 3 was going to be successful. I also thought there was no way they'd ever manage to get so many Starlink satellites in orbit before bankrupting themselves. Wrong, wrong and wrong again. The self driving doesn't seem like it will ever work, the Starship sounds like a fantasy and the robot sounds like an episode of Star Trek. But I'm just some guy who has been wrong every time about what Elon's companies can do, so what does my opinion matter?
      - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
rklaehn 5y ago
Absolutely blown away by dojo and their chip design. It seems that they are on the way to building the most powerful machine learning supercomputer in the world in house. Where do these chips get made? TSMC? I would love to know how their new chip compares with the FSD chip in terms of power usage per teraflop. Also, it seems that what they call "vector space" is really a 2d plane, so how do they deal with 3d scenarios such as parking garages and complex overpasses. They are rare, but they do exist. The news will of course be all about the humanoid robot and the somewhat silly dancer, giving ammo to the detractors...
- cogman10 5y ago
  ditto. Was definitely the most impressive part of the presentation (IMO). Also, did I catch it right? One of those plates is 15kW of power? That's some crazy heat dissipation!
- raghavkhanna 5y ago
  That was my question too. It seems they have a deal with Samsung, atleast for the FSD computer chips[1]. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/05/03/how-tesla-pivoted-avoid-global-chip-shortage/#:~:text=Tesla%20uses%20several%20chips%20inside,chip%20is%20produced%20by%20Samsung https://electrek.co/2021/05/03/how-tesla-pivoted-avoid-globa....
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Blown away by a prototype clamped to a bench, eh? If this thing existed they'd have MLPerf benchmarks to show.
  - sidibe 5y ago
    Yup, stick around for the QA. During the presentation it sounded like it was practically ready. Someone asked about memory locality when actually putting them together and the infra guy started saying it's a really hard problem. Finally Elon said "This will be ready next year" The whole presentation (not just dojo) felt like the kind of presentation you give internally to a VP when you haven't been making much progress. Flood them with challenges and implementation detail decisions they can't follow and don't talk about results.
ckastner 5y ago
To think that on Autonomy Day in 2019, Musk promised that Tesla will "have over a million robo-taxis on the road" in 2020 [1]. Musk is a visionary that has delivered amazing promises. That doesn't mean all of his promises are amazing. Some are quite clearly BS (for example, I don't think robotaxis are impossible in general, but announcing a million of them on a 15-month time frame absolutely was). [1] eg: https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-robo-taxi.html?guccounter=1 https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...
- cogman10 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't think it's possible with the current hardware. The best Tesla can hope for is Level 3, mainly due to the lack of redundancy.
- simiones 5y ago
  Musk is a fraudster who has consistently lied to investors and the public about timelines and features - FSD, SolarWinds solar tiles, the robotaxis, "founding" Tesla, "founding" PayPal, the Vegas "loop", cheaper tunnels, hyperloop, NeuraLink brain-computer videogames, flying cars, the cave submarine, turbines on cars, "more efficient" batteries and on and on and on. There are a few lies that have not yet been proven lies - the 40k satellites or the Mars settlement or the $2M rocket, for example - but I have faith that they will also prove to be lies in time. His only contributions have been early investment in Tesla and hiring the right people for SpaceX to achieve some decent cost savings and vertical landing on Earth. It's definitely not nothing, but it really shouldn't make anyone believe 99% of what he says, or consider him some kind of genius.
  - polytely 5y ago
    Starship seems really promising, though, making amazing progress in record time. I'm really optimistic about SpaceX, that whole company seems to be aligned toward one goal only, getting people on mars, if I had any expertise in that area I would sign up in a second.
    - 5y ago
mchusma 5y ago
Random thoughts: I thought the fact they have 1,000 data labelers was interesting. I'm unsure about their dojo efforts. Seems cool, seems better than Nvidia but not 10x better (hard to tell it's not apples to apples). For example their dojo cluster us supposed to have over an exaflop vs a A100 superpod at 700pb (seems like I/O is over 2x better which I understand conceptually why it matters but not real world implications). By the time this gets production ready (next year) seems possible Nvidia will have a replacement that is about as good or better. Network architecture was not using video before, it was using 2-3 frames, which seemed obviously not going to work so seems better now. The updated network architecture plus the fact they need to train with a supercomputer to me means they will almost certainly need a new inference chip. They didn't announce a v3 of their FSD computer, but that is probably the physical component blocking FSD rollout. My take on timeline for actual compete everywhere self driving (robotaxi) seems to be: -dojo isn't even in production until next year, so no earlier than that. -FSD chip v3 probably not going to be design finalized until they use some dojo models in it. That plus chip shortages means it's unlikely to happen at scale until 2023. So I think this presentation was to make it clear the large about of progress they are making (very impressive), but IMO this was also a subtle way of making 2023 the new target FSD date. The alternative is they don't think they need dojo to get FSD, and if that is the case why bother building a fully integrated chip manufacturing process?
- dawnerd 5y ago
  V3 is what’s currently shipping right now. Elon called it FSD 1 and said FSD 2 might come with Cybertruck.
- _coveredInBees 5y ago
  They are already deploying the kinds of models talked about here in their FSD beta software (along with regular FSD/AP software) and they run just fine on current FSD hardware in the cars with acceptable latency. Just because you need a monstrous supercomputer to train these models doesn't mean you cannot run inference on them on much more light-weight devices. Some reasons being: 1. Training requires them to make use of ridiculous amount of data which requires large GPU compute + RAM and super high bandwidth to keep the GPUs fed at all times. Backpropagation requires a LOT of bookkeeping that adds on a lot of RAM requirement at train-time. 2. Inference is a lot easier. You just need to worry about keeping up with your 8 cameras and running them through your network. You also aren't calculating any gradients and dealing with needing to do any of the bookkeeping for backpropagation so you need a LOT less RAM 3. There are a ton of tricks you can do to make a trained network a lot more efficient for inference such as lower precision models (int8 or in their case, CFP8), network pruning, compiler tricks, etc. It is quite impressive that they've managed to fit all this into their current V3 hardware. That being said, they are definitely starting to really hit the limits of V3 and in the long-run will likely need to upgrade the FSD hardware on newer cars. They are probably trying to avoid having to provide a retrofit for all cars in the fleet as that would be prohibitively expensive.
bjornlouser 5y ago
"... the car can be thought of as an animal..."

64 points by jonbaer 5y ago

There is a wow factor in the presentation, especially how many of the things they are making from ground-up and in-house, at times making me feel like, may be they want to be AI company now. Definitely the TSLA stock price increase is being reflected into the massive investments into AI.

avelis 5y ago
Stock price will likely not go up the day after. Analysts have to break down the implication in terms of potential revenue models that Tesla could gain for it. From there we can establish a future price target based on potential revenue. For now the market wants to focus on revenue today, that is mostly sold products today and near term products soon to be available.
- sremani 5y ago
  What I meant was, given the meteroic rise in the past years increase in valuation - Tesla took a lot of capital and invested in this division.
tenpies 5y ago
> Definitely the TSLA stock price increase is being reflected into the massive investments into AI. Actually the best indicator of stock price increase has been if an unknown buyer comes in an buys huge amounts of OTM calls expiring that week with the hope of causing a gamma squeeze. Watch the option flow. You'll note also that it just hasn't been the same since Archegos imploded for example, but there is definitely another smaller buyer doing the same. It's almost certainly a group effort given the amount of money at play.

aantix 5y ago

What’s the biggest advancement/feature, in your opinion?

6d6b73 5y ago
You mean biggest fraud? Tesla Bot of course
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cogman10 5y ago
Dojo. Because it's real and pretty impressive. It shows Tesla has some pretty good hardware chops.

maxdo 5y ago

I've been watching their presentations from time to time. The progress they maid within 1-2 years is incredible. They clearly focused a lot and betting a lot on their approach. Wouldn't be surprised if they'll become a real waymo competitor in 1.5 year. Saying"competitor" I mean real application of robotaxi but with major some issues. Waymo's approach still failing a nose cones on the road for example.

AppleCandy 5y ago
How does Tesla's tech compare with Waymo? I just can't imagine how Waymo or any other company can compete with the first-principles full stack engineering and scaling of Tesla, which touches virtually every important dimension of consideration. And that is today, not even a year from now. The foundation Tesla has built and shown on AI day will progressively increase their lead in the years to come, I just don't see how anyone can compete with that level of forward thinking. To me it just seems obvious, so what am I missing about Waymo?
- criticaltinker 5y ago
  I've been told the consensus on HN is that Waymo is far ahead of Tesla in terms of tech. See this post & discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236964
- raisedbyninjas 5y ago
  Waymo and everybody else are only trying to solve one AI problem. Tesla wanted to tackle two at the same time. Maybe they can do it, but its just an extra hurdle that others are stepping around. Also Waymo has had level 4 deployed for years.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    In geofenced customizer non consumer cars? Tesla/musk self driving claims require extensive independent verification, as do the other fsd wannabes (they are all wannabes right now). I still would like primary focus on highway driving and safety. That is the big efficiency win for logistics and slot easier than urban streets

bko 5y ago

The newly announced Tesla humanoid bot is around 2:05:11. Expected prototype in 2022. The demo was an obvious troll but it looks pretty exciting. I'd rather have resources put into actual innovation than learning how to increase the likelihood someone will click a button by 0.01% https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7511 https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7511

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I had the tv on last night, and woke up thinking Musk made a huge advancement in robotics.

criticaltinker 5y ago

Previous discussion from 13 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240882

6d6b73 5y ago
That discussion was already pushed off the first page, probably because too many people now see Musk for the fraud he is. < Bracing for down votes from Tesla Bots > :)
- cardosof 5y ago
  I see this opinion over and over again, but I don't know the reasons sustaining it, so I will ask: why is he a fraud? Are his companies fraudulent as well or just their iconic leader/founder?
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    this sums it up from three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997438
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    People have been expressing this skepticism for many years and every time there's a groundbreaking accomplishment the goalposts get moved. At what point are we able to admit that he's the most accomplished CEO since Steve Jobs? I personally thought the rocket reusability sounded far-fetched and doubted the Model 3 was going to be successful. I also thought there was no way they'd ever manage to get so many Starlink satellites in orbit before bankrupting themselves. Wrong, wrong and wrong again. The self driving doesn't seem like it will ever work, the Starship sounds like a fantasy and the robot sounds like an episode of Star Trek. But I'm just some guy who has been wrong every time about what Elon's companies can do, so what does my opinion matter?
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago

rklaehn 5y ago

Absolutely blown away by dojo and their chip design. It seems that they are on the way to building the most powerful machine learning supercomputer in the world in house. Where do these chips get made? TSMC? I would love to know how their new chip compares with the FSD chip in terms of power usage per teraflop. Also, it seems that what they call "vector space" is really a 2d plane, so how do they deal with 3d scenarios such as parking garages and complex overpasses. They are rare, but they do exist. The news will of course be all about the humanoid robot and the somewhat silly dancer, giving ammo to the detractors...

cogman10 5y ago
ditto. Was definitely the most impressive part of the presentation (IMO). Also, did I catch it right? One of those plates is 15kW of power? That's some crazy heat dissipation!
raghavkhanna 5y ago
That was my question too. It seems they have a deal with Samsung, atleast for the FSD computer chips[1]. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/05/03/how-tesla-pivoted-avoid-global-chip-shortage/#:~:text=Tesla%20uses%20several%20chips%20inside,chip%20is%20produced%20by%20Samsung https://electrek.co/2021/05/03/how-tesla-pivoted-avoid-globa....
jeffbee 5y ago
Blown away by a prototype clamped to a bench, eh? If this thing existed they'd have MLPerf benchmarks to show.
- sidibe 5y ago
  Yup, stick around for the QA. During the presentation it sounded like it was practically ready. Someone asked about memory locality when actually putting them together and the infra guy started saying it's a really hard problem. Finally Elon said "This will be ready next year" The whole presentation (not just dojo) felt like the kind of presentation you give internally to a VP when you haven't been making much progress. Flood them with challenges and implementation detail decisions they can't follow and don't talk about results.

ckastner 5y ago

To think that on Autonomy Day in 2019, Musk promised that Tesla will "have over a million robo-taxis on the road" in 2020 [1]. Musk is a visionary that has delivered amazing promises. That doesn't mean all of his promises are amazing. Some are quite clearly BS (for example, I don't think robotaxis are impossible in general, but announcing a million of them on a 15-month time frame absolutely was). [1] eg: https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-robo-taxi.html?guccounter=1 https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...

cogman10 5y ago
Yeah, I don't think it's possible with the current hardware. The best Tesla can hope for is Level 3, mainly due to the lack of redundancy.
simiones 5y ago
Musk is a fraudster who has consistently lied to investors and the public about timelines and features - FSD, SolarWinds solar tiles, the robotaxis, "founding" Tesla, "founding" PayPal, the Vegas "loop", cheaper tunnels, hyperloop, NeuraLink brain-computer videogames, flying cars, the cave submarine, turbines on cars, "more efficient" batteries and on and on and on. There are a few lies that have not yet been proven lies - the 40k satellites or the Mars settlement or the $2M rocket, for example - but I have faith that they will also prove to be lies in time. His only contributions have been early investment in Tesla and hiring the right people for SpaceX to achieve some decent cost savings and vertical landing on Earth. It's definitely not nothing, but it really shouldn't make anyone believe 99% of what he says, or consider him some kind of genius.
- polytely 5y ago
  Starship seems really promising, though, making amazing progress in record time. I'm really optimistic about SpaceX, that whole company seems to be aligned toward one goal only, getting people on mars, if I had any expertise in that area I would sign up in a second.
  - 5y ago

mchusma 5y ago

Random thoughts: I thought the fact they have 1,000 data labelers was interesting. I'm unsure about their dojo efforts. Seems cool, seems better than Nvidia but not 10x better (hard to tell it's not apples to apples). For example their dojo cluster us supposed to have over an exaflop vs a A100 superpod at 700pb (seems like I/O is over 2x better which I understand conceptually why it matters but not real world implications). By the time this gets production ready (next year) seems possible Nvidia will have a replacement that is about as good or better. Network architecture was not using video before, it was using 2-3 frames, which seemed obviously not going to work so seems better now. The updated network architecture plus the fact they need to train with a supercomputer to me means they will almost certainly need a new inference chip. They didn't announce a v3 of their FSD computer, but that is probably the physical component blocking FSD rollout. My take on timeline for actual compete everywhere self driving (robotaxi) seems to be: -dojo isn't even in production until next year, so no earlier than that. -FSD chip v3 probably not going to be design finalized until they use some dojo models in it. That plus chip shortages means it's unlikely to happen at scale until 2023. So I think this presentation was to make it clear the large about of progress they are making (very impressive), but IMO this was also a subtle way of making 2023 the new target FSD date. The alternative is they don't think they need dojo to get FSD, and if that is the case why bother building a fully integrated chip manufacturing process?

dawnerd 5y ago
V3 is what’s currently shipping right now. Elon called it FSD 1 and said FSD 2 might come with Cybertruck.
_coveredInBees 5y ago
They are already deploying the kinds of models talked about here in their FSD beta software (along with regular FSD/AP software) and they run just fine on current FSD hardware in the cars with acceptable latency. Just because you need a monstrous supercomputer to train these models doesn't mean you cannot run inference on them on much more light-weight devices. Some reasons being: 1. Training requires them to make use of ridiculous amount of data which requires large GPU compute + RAM and super high bandwidth to keep the GPUs fed at all times. Backpropagation requires a LOT of bookkeeping that adds on a lot of RAM requirement at train-time. 2. Inference is a lot easier. You just need to worry about keeping up with your 8 cameras and running them through your network. You also aren't calculating any gradients and dealing with needing to do any of the bookkeeping for backpropagation so you need a LOT less RAM 3. There are a ton of tricks you can do to make a trained network a lot more efficient for inference such as lower precision models (int8 or in their case, CFP8), network pruning, compiler tricks, etc. It is quite impressive that they've managed to fit all this into their current V3 hardware. That being said, they are definitely starting to really hit the limits of V3 and in the long-run will likely need to upgrade the FSD hardware on newer cars. They are probably trying to avoid having to provide a retrofit for all cars in the fleet as that would be prohibitively expensive.

bjornlouser 5y ago

"... the car can be thought of as an animal..."