Tesla has posted a lengthy job ad for its AI efforts by announcing it’s going to build a humaniform robot prototype.

CEO Elon Musk on Thursday announced the project at the automaker’s AI day, saying that Tesla already does most of the things a robot needs – sensing, AI, and actuators – and claimed without a hint of irony that the company’s cars are already “semi-sentient” robots thanks to their self-driving capabilities.

That’ll be the capabilities being probed and challenged in America right now after several auto-autos were involved in nasty crashes.

With all that expertise in hand, Musk suggested Tesla might as well therefore build a robot.

Details were scant. Musk suggested the bot will stand 5’8″ (172cm) tall, weigh 125 pounds (56.7kg), and be capable of carrying 45 pounds (20kg) or deadlifting 150 pounds (68kg). The bot has a brief to eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.”

“It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans,” Musk said, adding that flesh-and-blood humans could “most likely overpower it” and definitely outrun it – which is reassuring to anyone who has watched Westworld.

A prototype will arrive some time in 2022, Musk promised.

Tesla has also promised to ramp production of its cars, deliver a Cybertruck and a semi-truck — and has blown deadlines for all. In 2019, Musk promised a million robot taxis would hit the road in 2020.

None have made it out of the factory, never mind out of a garage. But some have made it onto the streets of Beijing using tech from China’s Baidu.

So yeah, let’s all look forward to Tesla selling humaniform robots – despite conventional thinking suggesting that replicating our own bodies is far from the best way to perform dangerous tasks, and that replicating complicated parts of the human body like fingers creates complexity.

Musk’s robotic announcement came at Tesla’s AI Day, at which the manufacturer revealed more about its in-house efforts to develop the technology and put it to work.

Execs detailed how Tesla has built its own training computer and silicon to cope with the immense AI models the carmaker requires.

Among the kit inside is Tesla’s own D1 silicon, built on a seven-nanometre manufacturing process and possessing 362 teraflops of processing power apiece. Tesla puts 25 D1s onto a “tile” and assembles the tiles into a distributed computer, said Ganesh Venkataraman, senior director of Autopilot hardware. Tesla places 25 of these chips onto a single “training tile”. Six tiles go into “trays” and Tesla will put a pair of trays into each cabinet of a supercomputer called Dojo.

Execs promised Dojo will go live next year and will be the fastest AI training computer anywhere. Tesla intends to use it to run PyTorch, and has a next-gen plan for faster hardware still.

Musk suggested that Dojo could be used to work on applications beyond Tesla’s own needs for autonomous driving, but again offered no details.

He did, however, repeatedly say that in his opinion Tesla is probably the world’s biggest user of AI.

And then he then turned the presentation into a job ad.

“We basically want to encourage anyone who is interested in solving real-world AI problems at either the hardware or the software level to join Tesla, or consider joining Tesla,” said Musk.

Or maybe consider joining Baidu, which also has AI-centric silicon and is already working on applications beyond robo-cars. Or perhaps another Chinese AI automaker – Geely – takes your fancy, seeing as last week it inked a pact with Renault to take its tech to the world. ®

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Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/08/20/tesla_ai_day/