CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the company is reaching far beyond electric cars.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently pointed out that the company had been dabbling in artificial intelligence as its AI teams develop powerful software and hardware for self-driving vehicles. As a result, the company is taking directions well beyond electric cars and could steer itself toward AI robotics as well.
Since Musk spoke to analysts at the Tesla financial status call for Q1 2021, speculations have abounded.
“We appear to be able to do things with self-driving that others cannot. So and if you look at the evolution of what technologies we have developed, we developed them in order to solve the problem of self-driving,” he said while addressing the analysts. “The software out there was really quite primitive for this task and so we built a team from scratch and have been developing what we think is probably the most advanced real-world AI in the world.”
Musk encouraged analysts to view the company as more than an automaker and to look at it in the same way that one would consider a group of start-ups. In that way, it could indeed be seen as a company that produces electric cars, but also an energy company, an artificial intelligence company, and a great deal more.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Tesla is headed into heavier artificial intelligence.
For many years, Musk has been taking greater steps into AI development and investing. In fact, he founded a company called OpenAI with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. That company came to be for the purpose of developing and opening access to a basic level of AI. At first, it was a non-profit. That said, last year it became a company and established a partnership with Micros
oft for the purpose of furthering AI developments in language, robotics and other areas.
Tesla is now openly pursuing AI for its self-driving vehicles but also sees opportunities in robotics. Furthermore, the company has been working on its Dojo supercomputer which is behind the autonomous artificial intelligence technology training at Tesla. Musk has previously claimed that Dojo is expected to become one of the most powerful computers in the world. He said that it was capable of performing an exaFLOP (one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second). Dojo will be optimized for training neural networks and other companies will be able to access it.