Tesla's AI Chips Are Rolling Out, But They Aren't A Self-Driving Panacea

Tesla has opted to design and deploy their own AI chips, a strategy to achieve true self-driving car capabilities but questions still remain. According to several media reports, the new AI chips Tesla devised to achieve true self-driving car status have begun rolling out to older Tesla models that require retrofitting to replace the prior on-board processors. Unfortunately, there has been some misleading reporting about those chips, a special type of AI computer processor that extensively supports Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), commonly referred to as Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL). Before I explore the over-hyped reporting, let me clarify that these custom-developed AI chips devised by Tesla engineers are certainly admirable, and the computer hardware design team deserves to be proud of what they have done. But such an acknowledgement does not also imply that they have somehow achieved a singularity marvel in AI, and nor does it mean they have miraculously solved the real-world problem of how to attain a true self-driving driverless car.