Who couldn’t be impressed with the robot emerging from the Tesla labs revealed on AI day? Many technologists love robot futures, but it’s been a long time coming for many. Scratching beneath the surface, what are the broader implications? Some researchers think that we are at the beginning of the age of Artificial General Intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can
wikipedia
Tesla’s AI Platform
Tesla is perhaps best known for its EV cars, and it has pretty much revolutionized the personal transportation landscape. Has tesla now just revolutionized the AI landscape too? Not content with using other hardware to create its AI platform, Tesla has built their own. Introducing DOJO.
DOJO – the AI platform from Tesla
Tesla has a history of building its own technology. They did this with tesla parts, refusing to take them off the shelf from suppliers and instead engineering their own. Consider what they did with door handles, where Tesla decided to re-engineer them. No surprise, Tesla has been wanting to develop its own “AI” stack and now it has. Enter DOJO.
DOJO is Tesla’s in-house AI supercomputer for machine learning. Instead of relying on providers such as Nvidia, or even Intel, Tesla has built from the ground up. It is primarily built for image recognition since this is one of the key components of FSD or Full Self Driving for its cars. Tesla vehicles have gone down the road of wanting to have their own systems that self-steer with cameras only, which means Tesla has moved headlong into developing machine-learning vision systems.
AGI requires something more specific than typical machine learning workflows. But as so much of the intelligence of Tesla vehicles is based on understanding vision-type problems, could there be some significant gains for more general types of AI? The recent Optimus robot from Tesla has put Tesla on notice with developing a generic AI platform. Some have suggested that a robot will accelerate the demand for understanding more about human developments and relationships, which can bring a greater need to understand more than just vision-type problems. Whether DOJO can be allied to other applications and their effectiveness is just speculation, but the point here is that Tesla has the means and the will to do so.
