August 29th will be a day much like any other; it will pass and most people will not understand that a landmark event occurred. Similarly, only a few people were aware when the Guttenberg press printed its’ first page, when Galileo discovered our solar system secrets and when Pasteur found that microorganisms cause disease. For the geek world, August 29 will be a big day, and very probably will affect us in ways we can’t even think of right now. Tesla, widely known for cars and solar energy, is activating something that previously only governments and well-funded universities had access to. They are turning on their AI neural networks computer farm.
This farm will initially use 10,000 Nvidia N100 cards at $30,000 each (each Nvidia GPU on those cards is equivalent to 32 computer cores) and begin powering up their proprietary “Dojo” superchips. Quoting Nvidia: The GPU also includes a dedicated Transformer Engine to solve trillion-parameter language models. In other words, incomprehensibly fast. By January of 2024, Tesla will have the fifth most powerful computer on the planet … by October of 2024, the Tesla supercomputer (SC) will be the most powerful computer in history and will still be learning and growing. They’re spending more than $2 billion a year to expand the capabilities of this beast.
So, what is it for?
Previously, all the coding for their Full Self Drive (FSD) was done by hand as bugs and enhancements were developed. But now with millions of Tesla’s rolling down highways, the endless amount of data collected simply couldn’t be addressed any longer by humans. With the new supercomputer, it will amass the data and evaluate what needs to be fixed, modified or added. The meaning of this is that their system will be sucking up all the data from those millions of cars and rewriting the code for their FSD and Autopilot. In a few hours, it will be able to do what rooms of the brightest engineers would take a few years to solve … and Tesla’s SC literally gets more accurate and faster, every second. This effectively means the end of any other competitors as they depend on GPS, cellular networks, radar, Lidar, pre-mapped data and much more. Tesla’s version needs absolutely nothing else beyond its software and cameras, on any road, anywhere in the world.
While the FSD on occasion, as per my personal experiences, has been scary to say the least, this holds the key to resolving those problems. FSD developers Cruze, Waymo and 60+ others simply lack the skilled engineers, money and computer problem-crushing capability of the new Tesla system. They are just too far behind even without the release of the Tesla SC … so this final piece of the puzzle means that probably many will be folding fairly soon. Why would investors pour money into a technology that is so inferior to what Tesla has developed? Do they think the other automobile companies don’t understand what’s happening? Who would pay for their inferior tech when Musk has said it will license the Tesla code?
I’ve seen the “competitors” for this Tesla tech at various CES shows and as I had written earlier, they were comically bad with their cars sprouting appendages everywhere looking like something from a Ghostbusters movie.
While the Tesla SC is initially used for the cars and FSD/Autopilot, the broader uses are far more intriguing, and the tech for the car will just become a footnote as its uses are more important for robotics, their Neuralink research, Starlink, Twitter X coding and SpaceX. Think about a humanoid-like robot, powered by this very AI, assembling the Boring companies’ machine to tunnel underground on Mars for astronauts homes. The reach of the Teslas’ AI may very well change how mankind exists and goes forward … Will we in one hundred years have a Musk or Tesla day on the calendars to celebrate … or curse?
My only request for Musk is admittingly selfish, but give the cancer researchers a day or more a year to model a cure on this electronical marvel. Think about this request, as the life it may save may be yours Mr. Musk, or someone you love.