Tesla’s ‘Dojo’ supercomputer will practice its vision-centric autonomous tech | Engadget

Tesla has gone all-in on vision-only autonomous driving, to the purpose of even phasing out radar sensors in a few of its EVs. Now at a CVPR 2021 workshop, Tesla senior director of AI Andrej Karpathy has explained the way it’s planning to do that by utilizing an in-house supercomputer known as “Dojo,” as TechCrunch has reported. 

Karparthy defined that with vision-only tech, computer systems should reply to new environments with the identical pace and acuity as a human. However, doing that requires AI coaching on a large dataset with a robust supercomputer to crunch it. Tesla has a kind of in home with “Dojo,” a next-gen mannequin with 1.8 exaflops of efficiency and 10 petabytes of NVME storage operating at 1.6 terabytes per second. 

While the system hasn’t been benchmarked, Karparthy figures it will be one of many quickest on the planet. “If you take the total number of FLOPS it would indeed place somewhere around the fifth spot,” Karpathy told TechCrunch. “The fifth spot is currently occupied by NVIDIA with their Selene cluster, which has a very comparable architecture and similar number of GPUs.”

To practice the system, Tesla’s supercomputer collects video from eight cameras on Tesla automobiles every operating at 36 frames per second. While that generates an enormous quantity of knowledge, it is extra scalable than constructing and sustaining high-definition maps world wide. However, it additionally requires almost instantaneous processing, which must be handled as a supervised studying drawback. 

So far, the system works effectively in sparsely populated areas, the place vehicles can drive round with no intervention. However, Tesla has discovered (like all different autonomous car firms) that navigating densely populated areas is far more tough. Still, Karpathy mentioned that Tesla’s laptop has been capable of deal with new kinds of site visitors warnings, pedestrian collision detections and pedal misapplications, the latter occurring when a driver unintentionally presses the gasoline as a substitute of the brakes. 

Despite a number of infamous Tesla accidents the place the autonomous driving techniques failed to select up obstacles or accurately monitor a route, CEO Elon Musk is firmly dedicated to vision-only. “When radar and vision disagree, which one do you believe? Vision has much more precision, so better to double down on vision than do sensor fusion,” he tweeted not too long ago. The firm believes a supercomputer will lastly assist automobiles attain superior self-driving functionality, however it’s greatest to take a wait-and-see perspective as we have heard that tune earlier than. 

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