The Calculus of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Driving

I used two of the hottest buzz words in one sentence: artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. It should be no surprise the two would be mentioned in the same sentence. Artificial intelligence and, specifically, the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image recognition has forever changed the automotive playing field by delivering higher levels of accuracy over more traditional computer vision algorithms. In fact, today's state-of-the-art image recognition algorithm--based on CNN--has been shown to deliver accuracy that is superior to humans. However, this accuracy comes at a price: highly accurate CNNs that are used to achieve level 5 autonomous driving can easily require 10s of 100s of teraflops of compute performance.