Tesla on Friday held its annual AI Day event to showcase the company’s latest leaps in Artificial Intelligence, automation, and computation.
The event kicked off with Tesla showing off the first working prototype of ‘Optimus,’ the long-awaited Tesla Bot. Despite merely being a prototype, Optimus was able to walk out on stage, wave to the crowd, and even ‘raise the roof’ to music untethered and all on its own.
“The Optimus has two times the economic output [of people],” Musk said on stage. “Actually, it’s not clear what the limit actually is.”
Tesla’s final version of Optimus will have 200+ degrees of body freedom and its hands will have 11 degrees of freedom, said Musk. The robot will be able to recognize objects as humans would and its movements will be powered by 28 structural actuators.
According to Musk, Optimus could go on sale in three to five years. The Tesla CEO said the robot would cost less than $20,000 USD when manufactured at scale.
After his keynote address, Musk tweeted to confirm that there will eventually also be a “catgirl” version of Optimus.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2022
Next, Tesla’s Autopilot team took to the stage and talked about the latest advancements with the company’s autonomous driving software, Full Self-Driving (FSD).
FSD is currently in public beta and only available in the U.S. and Canada. Even so, Tesla announced that the FSD beta now comprises 160,000 Tesla drivers. Musk teased that, barring regulatory issues, Tesla could expand the FSD beta worldwide by the end of the year.
According to Tesla engineers, FSD’s decision-making capabilities have become 10 times faster through intensive neural net training and other improvements.
Finally, Tesla engineers talked about Dojo — Tesla’s homegrown supercomputer for AI research and neural net training. Tesla is transitioning to using Dojo to process and train its AI on all the video and data its massive fleet of cars sends back.
Five fingers Tesla #AIDay2022 pic.twitter.com/vcii1kI3i2
— Chuck Cook (@chazman) September 30, 2022
A process that takes one Dojo tile comprised of 25 D1 chips just five microseconds to complete would take a stack of 24 off-the-shelf, enterprise-level GPUs 150 microseconds.
What’s more, Tesla is looking to deploy six of these tiles in each system tray, with two of those trays making up one single cabinet (called an ExaPOD). Tesla plans to bring its first ExaPOD online sometime in the first quarter of 2023, with six more in the works.
To top it all off, that’s just the first generation of Tesla’s Dojo hardware. The company is already working on the next generation, which it said will be 10 times better with more advanced hardware.
You can watch Tesla’s full AI Day 2022 event live stream below:
Alternatively, you can check out a condensed “supercut” of the event below:
