(Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc. staged an AI Day event to showcase its work on autonomous driving — which has come under regulatory scrutiny — and unveiled plans for a life-like robot that Elon Musk said will take the drudgery out of everyday life.
The company also highlighted progress made on its own semiconductor, designed in-house specifically to train neural networks that are the brains behind its driver-assistance systems. Musk said he would consider licensing the technology to rivals.
The chip is a crucial part of the system that makes up Dojo, a previously touted supercomputer that Tesla says is key to cracking fully autonomous driving. Musk said the company should have Dojo operating next year.
The event, designed to tout Tesla as more than just an automaker and help recruit talent to the Palo Alto, California-based company, took place days after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a formal defect investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system following almost a dozen collisions at crash scenes involving first-responder vehicles.
Read more: Tesla Autopilot Probed by U.S. Over Crash-Scene Collisions
While rivals such as Aurora, Cruise, Waymo and Zoox are using a blend of cameras, lidar and radar to pursue autonomy, Tesla is working on a purely “vision”-based system, using eight cameras mounted into its vehicles to process a real-time three-dimensional “vector space.”
In a series of videos, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of AI, showed a self-driving car negotiating traffic and turns and likened the camera setup and neural network to the neural system of a human brain. Other engineers talked about Tesla’s 1,000 person-strong data-labeling team and simulation capabilities.
“It seems like the multi-camera feature to capture the bird’s-eye view has improved,” said Ijteba Ali Agha, a portfolio manager at HBL Bank Ltd. in London, who stayed up past 2 a.m. to watch the presentation. “A lot of tech stuff Andrej is explaining — it seems that the company is advancing.”
Tesla’s Autopilot is still considered to be a Level 2 driver-assistance feature — not full self-driving.
One of the biggest developments outlined during the presentation was the progress Tesla has made on its own semiconductor. The D1 chip, along with an integrated system of other processors and connectors, makes up the “training tiles” that will power the Dojo supercomputer.
Tesla’s chip has “GPU-level” computing power and twice the bandwidth of chips used in networks, executives said.
Read more: Five Takeaways From Tesla’s AI Day Presentation
Musk said that it was unlikely Tesla would open-source the technology but that it would consider licensing it to rivals. The biggest suppliers of chips to the automotive industry include Infineon Technologies AG, Renesas Electronics Corp. and NXP Semiconductors NV. Global automakers have been slammed by a shortage of chips, highlighted on Thursday by Toyota Motor Corp. slashing its production plan for September by 40%.
“It is fundamentally extremely expensive to create the system, so somehow that has to be paid for,” Musk said. “I am not sure how to pay for it if its fully open-sourced. Unless people want to work for free.”
At the end of the two-hour event, Musk’s reappearance to introduce the Tesla Bot reinvigorated proceedings.
Preceded onto the stage by a person dressed in a skintight white suit and black helmet doing a jerky robot dance, Musk announced plans for a life-like humanoid robot designed to take the drudgery out of everyday life.
A prototype probably will be available sometime next year that will eliminate “dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks,” like bending over to pick something up or go to the store for groceries, Musk said. “Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice.”
Musk has a long history of unveiling products that are merely prototypes, essentially selling a vision before it exists in reality. In November 2017, Tesla unveiled its Semi truck at a late-night event near Los Angeles, but that vehicle has been pushed back until 2022 at the earliest, due in part to challenges making larger battery cells.
“Elon has a big vision,” said analyst Gene Munster of Loup Ventures. “For investors, the Tesla Bot is something new that they can dream about. The chip is more substance, but boring for most investors.”
Read More: Driverless? No, But How About the Car as Co-Pilot?: QuickTake
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