Elon Musk: Tesla is making a custom AI chip, will be best in the world

Earlier this year, there were a couple of rumors about the chip design efforts at Tesla. In June, there was a story that Jim Keller is working on a self-driving car chip to replace the NVIDIA chips that are currently used by Tesla. A couple of months later, news emerged that Tesla licensed some intellectual property (IP) from AMD to realize this goal.

At this week's Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Tesla boss Elon Musk officially confirmed that his company is working on an artificial intelligence chip. Musk boasted that he thinks that Tesla's chip will be the best custom solution in the world.

Electrek reports Musk was there with Tesla’s new Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, Andrej Karpathy, Jim Keller, Tesla’s Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering, and Shivon Zilis, a partner at Bloomberg Beta and a project director for Musk’s office. The site writes people at the event said Musk's fireside chat felt a lot like a recruiting effort for Tesla.

It's a big gamble as Tesla is already overstretched as it is, the company is struggling to mass produce its Model 3 and is running out of cash. However, Musk and Keller hinted that there's plenty of room to improve self-driving car hardware. Musk said Tesla may be able to create a chip that offers ten times the current power at a fraction of what the company is paying NVIDIA:

When asked about potential improvements at the event yesterday, Keller said that there are opportunities to remove overheads between components for specialized hardware, which Musk says could result in 10 times the current power for a fraction of the cost.

Computing power inside vehicles is becoming increasingly important and like several other generally outsourced vehicle components, Tesla seems dead serious about bringing it in-house.

Tesla's current Autopilot 2.5 self-driving car platform revolves around NVIDIA's Drive PX platform. Musk previously promised that Tesla will replace existing Autopilot 2.0 and 2.5 car computers for free if they won't be able to activate full self-driving on these systems.