Image: Tesla
Tesla is truly a unique company that is developing in several of the most disruptive areas of our time, achieving impressive results. At AI Day, the manufacturer demonstrated its special prowess in the field of artificial intelligence, which deserved special attention from ARK Invest.
ARK Invest is a longtime Tesla believer who not only sees the company's current success but understands its true potential. ARK saw in 2018 that Tesla's vertical integration strategy would enable the company to create "novel use cases, deeper moats, and faster execution." Already at that time, the manufacturer controlled the entire hardware stack, except for the semiconductors for training and self-driving, which Nvidia provided.
During AI Day on August 19, which was primarily dedicated to bringing in the best AI talent, Tesla unveiled an ambitious plan to complete the vertical integration of all its hardware and software components, from silicon, training cluster and compiler, to driving simulator. ARK is confident that if fully implemented in 2022, Tesla will become the most deeply integrated “automotive company” in the world.
Source: ARK Investment Management LLC
During AI Day, Tesla shared many details about its new Dojo supercomputer, which was specially designed for training in artificial intelligence, and which is capable of 1 exaflop of performance, roughly twice the raw performance of the most powerful supercomputer in the world today. The manufacturer said that Dojo is based on the D1 chip, designed from the ground up specifically for AI training, optimizing for low latency and high bandwidth. Tesla used System-on-Wafer chip packaging technology, thanks to which it can combine 25 D1s on one training tile and produce 9 petaflops of compute. A bespoke compiler designed to harness the D1's custom instruction set architecture should be able to train Tesla's neural networks with best-in-class hardware utilization.
ARK concluded that "by owning the AI stack—from training silicon to labeling to neural network design—Tesla should be able to iterate much faster than the competition. Not hostage to third parties shipping chips or fixing bugs, Tesla will be in full control."
© 2021, Eva Fox. All rights reserved.
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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
