Posted by This is to caution anyone tuning into the AI Day livestream: take Musk’s predictions about near-term achievement with a massive grain of salt.
The things that will be discussed in this post are unlikely to have any measurable impact on the company’s business in the months to come.
Self-driving cars are an incredibly difficult challenge. Even companies like Waymo that are perceived to have the best autonomous vehicle technology are still struggling to get it right. Including Tesla.
“A key question for investors will be what the latest timeline is for achieving full autonomy,” Loup Funds managing partner Gene Munster had initially said in a note.
“Despite Elon’s ambitious goal of the end of this year, our best guess is that 2025 will be the first year of public availability of level 4 autonomy”
The rest of 2021 is already jam packed for Tesla. The company needs to open factories in Texas and Germany.
Going back in time; It’s been nearly two years since Tesla’s first “Autonomy Day” event, at which CEO Elon Musk made numerous lofty predictions about the future of autonomous vehicles, including his infamous claim that the company would have “one million robotaxis on the road” by the end of 2020.
And now it’s time for Part DeuxThis time, the event will be called “AI Day,” and according to Musk, the “sole goal” is to persuade experts in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to come work at Tesla.
The company is known for its high rate of turnover, the latest being Jerome Guillen, a key executive who worked at Tesla for 10 years before recently stepping down. Attracting and retaining talent, especially top tier names, has proven to be a challenge for the company.
The big news however which came out of Tesla’s first Autonomy Day was the introduction of the company’s first computer chip, a 260 square millimeter piece of silicon that Musk described as “the best chip in the world.”
Originally, Musk had claimed that Tesla’s cars wouldn’t need any hardware updates, only software, on the road to full autonomy. Turns out that wasn’t exactly the case; they would need this new chip — two of them, actually — in order to eventually drive themselves.
A lot has happened between the 2019 event and now. Last month, Tesla began shipping over-the-air software updates for FSD beta v9, its long-awaited, definitely not autonomous, but certainly advanced driver assist system.
Earlier this month, Musk had recently announced that Tesla would Unviel it’s new Tesla Bot that’ll mimic human behaviours.
This had sent cold chills in the minds of many tech experts, as they wondered if such a bot would be 100 percent efficient, but that has a lot to do with the consistency and determination of the developers at the company.