• Source:JND
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to X (formerly called Twitter) to thank Ashok Elluswamy, the Indian-origin man who joined the Tesla AI/Autopilot team as its first member and is now leading all AI/Autopilot software at the company. Musk went on to add that without him and the autopilot team at Tesla, the company would have ended up looking for an "autonomy supplier".

For context, Ashok was associated with Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab and WABCO Vehicle Control Systems before Tesla. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Electronics and Communication from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai and a Master of Science in Robotic Systems Development from Carnegie Mellon University.

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The Autopilot Software Director recently cited examples of how the X owner has been the "key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla". He said Autopilot started on a "ridiculously tiny computer that only had ~ 384 KB of memory and puny compute (didn't even have native floating point arithmetic)". Musk asked the team to deploy lane keeping and changing, longitudinal control and curvature of vehicles.

While the goal seemed difficult initially, the company introduced the "world's first Autopilot system" in 2015. Following this, Tesla was working on computer vision for Autopilot rather than depending on other parties next year. Musk also pushed for AI hardware. Citing the most recent example, he added Musk kickstarted work on humanoid robots(like Optimus) in 2021.

"Tesla, which others thought was just a car company, was making custom silicon to run neural networks efficiently. This hardware that was originally designed in 2017, came to production in February 2019 and remains extremely competitive with hardware coming out to date," @aelluswamy said. The Tesla employee added this chip sports 8x the AI interference compute as Apple's M3. It is claimed to run end-to-end neural networks based on the latest AI technology.

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Musk emphasised vision and AI to solve autonomy and not rely on sensors crutches and HD maps. "For anyone who has experienced the latest versions of FSD (Full Self-Driving), it might be obvious that it can see all the important things and drive the car based on pure vision," he added. Tesla cars are claimed to handle the complexities of city driving while just seeing outside even without radars and ultrasonics for autonomous controls.