Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will hold an AI Day on August 19. While Musk didn’t give many details on the upcoming event, he did mention that it would function like a big job fair to attract talent that could work on AI-based applications like Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software.
It could wind up being similar in format to last year’s Battery Day, which included several announcements on Tesla’s work on automobile batteries like the development of a new, more efficient manufacturing process. In a similar fashion, AI Day is likely to include presentations on what Tesla’s current AI team is working on now.
In its bid to ramp up the capacity of its AI, Tesla recently activated another supercomputer geared toward training its Full Self-Driving AI and still plans to have the more capable Dojo supercomputer up by the end of the year. It previously relied on a team of humans who could label common elements that Tesla vehicles’ camera systems might see on the road, like signs and lane markings. Now, Tesla says, it has billions of miles’ worth of driving data to pull from and only needs the computing capacity to ramp up its AI.
Tesla has also released the Full Self-Driving Version 9 beta, which adds some features like off-highway lane changes, better visualization of what the exterior cameras see, and the activation of a camera mounted to the rearview mirror. The rearview mirror camera had previously been activated for Autopilot due to reports of crashes in which drivers may have relied too much on the Autopilot and dangerous stunts that involved people riding in the back seat of a driverless Tesla vehicle.
Some beta testers have already reported that there may be bugs in Version 9, which Tesla is likely already working on addressing for the next major update of its beta. According to communications between Tesla employees and regulators, Full Self-Driving is still a considerable way off from being fully autonomous. Tesla’s developers have recently admitted to California’s DMV that Elon Musk overstates Full Self-Driving’s capability, for instance. Even Elon Musk admitted that developing fully autonomous is more difficult than he had thought at first.
Like many other CEOs working for tech companies, including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Elon Musk has mastered the art of the product announcement event. Musk often puts in showy events for the announcements of potentially exciting new products like Tesla’s Cybertruck and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Although it’s common for the actual development and release of these products to face delays, these events certainly get attention from Musk’s fans and the media, though reporters covering them are not always capable of comprehending the tech behind Tesla’s products:
Elon Musk did confirm that the major goal of AI Day was to attract top talent in the field of AI, making it essentially a high-profile job fair for developers. Which basically means, if you plan on attending this event and have done hands-on work involving AI, be sure to bring your resume.
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