Elon Musk credits Ashok Elluswamy for Tesla’s AI and autopilot breakthroughs

Elon Musk introduced Ashok Elluswamy, the first hire for Tesla’s autopilot team, now leading its social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Musk credited Elluswamy for Tesla’s AI and autopilot software success, sharing an article by Elluswamy on X. Elluswamy praised Musk, stating, “He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time.”

In 2014, Tesla’s autopilot began on a tiny computer with just ~384 KB of memory, lacking native floating point arithmetic. Musk tasked the team with implementing lane keeping, lane changing, and vehicle control, which many deemed impossible. However, by 2015, Tesla shipped the world’s first Autopilot system, outpacing competitors by years.

In 2016, Tesla began in-house computer vision development for Autopilot, a feat other companies took over a decade to achieve. They succeeded within eleven months, establishing a robust AI team. Musk pushed for powerful AI hardware, resulting in custom silicon designed in 2017, which entered production in 2019. This hardware, still competitive today, boasts roughly 8x the AI inference compute of the state-of-the-art Apple M3 chip.

Musk bets on vision and AI over sensor crutches and high-definition maps for autonomy. Despite skepticism, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) now handles complex city driving tasks using pure vision. Tesla removed radars and ultrasonics to focus on AI, resulting in cars with minimal sensors but the highest autonomous capability.

In 2021, Musk initiated the development of humanoid robots at Tesla, anticipating the rise of AI before mainstream examples like ChatGPT. Similar to vehicle autonomy, the Optimus robot aims to be competent, scalable, and cost-effective, reflecting Musk’s extreme conviction and deep understanding of AI challenges, now Optimus is also being developed to be competent, scalable, and cost-effective in order to widely serve the world.