Tesla Is Building Its Own Custom AI Chips

At a party on the fringe of the year’s biggest AI conference, Elon Musk put an end to rumors about his automaker’s ambitions for AI hardware.

According to people invited to the event, Musk said he “wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts.” He added, “We are developing custom AI hardware chips.” He was joined on stage by Jim Keller, an engineer involved with developing silicon at AMD and Apple who joined Tesla last year, as well as Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of AI, and Shivon Zilis, also at Tesla.

Rumors have swirled about the possibility of Tesla’s building its own machine-learning chips since we explained last year that the firm had split with its original AI hardware supplier, MobilEye, after an accident involving Tesla’s AutoPilot technology. Now we know it’s true.

The event was orchestrated to help Tesla recruit engineers during the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. As well as talking about AI hardware, Musk also discussed topics including automated driving, artificial general intelligence, and brain-computer interfaces.

Predictably, he made some bold claims. He suggested that artificial general intelligence, the grand challenge of the field, would be achieved in just five or 10 years. For all the academic progress that’s been made in the past few years, it’s hard to imagine that anyone involved in the field would take that claim seriously. He also made typically bold remarks about when autonomous driving would arrive. 

Unsurprisingly, the claims raised eyebrows on Twitter among some tech-savvy attendees.