Musk Says Narrow AI Is Key To Autonomous Driving
With the recent announcement that Tesla and MobilEye are ending their long time business relationship, Elon Musk gave some details on what to expect from Tesla’s Autopilot and fully autonomous driving development.
On Tesla’s proprietary mapping initiatives. “What we’ve said thus far is that there’s need to have much higher definition maps than currently exists anywhere in the world in order to have full autonomy. And we’re in the process of building those and I think making good progress.”
Elon’s plan to get to fully autonomous. “all I’d say is that full autonomy is going to come a hell of a lot faster than anyone thinks it will. And I think what we’ve got under development is going to blow people’s minds. It blows my mind”
On the major hurdles that Tesla have to overcome to get to full autonomy. “Well, full autonomy is really a software limitation. I mean the hardware is just to create full autonomy, so it’s really about developing advanced, narrow AI for the car to operate on. I want to emphasize narrow AI, it’s like not going to take over the world, but it needs to be really good at driving a car. So increasingly sophisticated neural maps that can operate in reasonably sized computers in the car. That’s our focus.”
“I’m very optimistic about this. It’s exciting, it blows me away, the progress we’re making. So I think if I’m this close to it and it’s blowing me away, it’s really going to blow other people away when they see it for the first time.”
According to Wikipedia, “narrow AI” — also known as “weak AI” — defines nonsentient computer intelligence or AI that is focused on one narrow task. Weak AI is defined in contrast to either “strong AI (a machine with consciousness, sentience and mind) or “artificial general intelligence” (a machine with the ability to apply intelligence to any problem, rather than just one specific problem).” Wikipedia cites Apple’s Siri as an example of a “narrow AI”.
Putting all of Elon’s responses together, we can expect a significant announcement regarding an internal Tesla solution to autonomous driving which will involve a combination of “narrow AI” software implementing sophisticated neural maps and much higher definition maps but no major hardware upgrades.
That’s good news for current Tesla owners because it is a “software” solution that can be pushed to existing cars via over the air wireless updates.
Source: Teslarati
