Now now you know, we made it a point not to not to rehearse anything, and so as I just want to just as a as a as a just reminder, you're you're my last thing. Okay, okay, could you not ruin the whole thing?
All right?
All right? So now speaking of that, speaking of that, I think everybody would like to before we get into all of the good stuff, okay, and they want to go directly to the juicy stuff.
Okay, okay.
And the juicy stuff is this. Look, you know, you were quote as a saying that that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and I said potentially, and and well it goes on, it goes on, and you say, you say that it's like summoning the demon could be. How do you consolidate, rationalize the the the conflict between artificial intelligence of course deep learning that that obviously is going to be very important to self driving cars. How do you think through that?
Well, I don't think.
We're to worry about autonomous cars because that's sort of like a narrow form of AI, and it's not something that I think is very difficult. Actually, I think the to do autonomous driving to agree that's much safer than a person.
Is much easier than people think.
Yeah, right, and yeah, I think it's going to just become normal, Like it be like an elevator, Like nobod they used to have elevator operators and then we you know, we've developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you're at and you can just press the button. Nobody needs to operate the elevator. The car is just going to be like that.
And the elevators these days are even smart. I mean it knows it knows where to position an elevator, so that if you were to need an elevator, it's pretty close to you. Cars in the future will be pretty smart about that too.
Yeah, you'll be able to tell your car like take home, go here, go there, anything, and it'll just do it at an order of mag to safer than a person.
In fact, in the in the distant future, I.
Think it's probably going to be if people may outlaw driving cars because it's too dangerous, Like you can't have a person driving a two time death machine.
Now, if we if we have the right type of intelligence in a car, we we also don't have to make the cars that heavy. I would think, you know, cars are getting heavier and heavier, and it's got more and more stuff in it because it needs to survive all these incredible collisions and things like that. If I wonder if if we were to design cars that just
simply don't collide as much. I wonder if we could, we could relax on some of those laws and and yeah, make cars more fuel efficient and lighter and better to.
Right, you could definitely do that.
If you could count on not having an accident, then you can get rid of a huge amount of the crash structure and the airbags. And it'll be We're a long way from that, because there's always gonna be some for a very long time, there'll be some amount of legacy cars on the road. And I think it is important to just appreciate the size of the automotive industrial base. Like it's not as though like when somebody makes an autonomous car that suddenly all the cars will be autonomous.
It's like there's two billion of them.
Okay, So the total total number of cars and trucks on the road is two billion. In climbing, the capacity of car and truck production is about one hundred million a year. So if tomorrow all cars were autonomous, it would take twenty years to replace the fleet, assuming the fleet stayed the same size. Arguably it could get smaller if things are autonomous, but still it's it's still you know, maybe fifteen years or something, and it's not all going
to transition immediately. It'll take quite a while. So and it's the same for electrification of carsing that industrial base to be electric. I mean, if if all cars were suddenly fall cars produced were electric tomorrow, it would still take twenty years to replace the fleet.
And right now it's less than one percent.
So now you you you're you mentioned just now about about self driving cars being easier than people think. Now you have your vision of how to go from where we are today. Now, my model, my P eighty five D has lane detection and so it gets a little you know, when I get close to a lane, yep, it detects the uh uh the speed signs and then uses uses computer vision technology to do that. And but and that's today's adas. What is your what is your roadmap?
You know, how is that different than other people's roadmap? How do you think about how to get to self driving cars.
Yeah, well.
You kind of need the hardware foundation, the sort of sensor and computing foundation, and then you can keep uploading new software. At least you can with the TAILS because it's it's always connected. So the car that you have, you'll notice that it's the features are steadily improving. We now you know, have active cruise control, so it'll it'll use radar and camera fusion to track the car in front of you. It's also looking at with some of
the things that are coming out. It's got it looks at the brake lights, so it anticipates that the car's got the brake lights are active. It's going to get basically smarter and smarter even with the current hardware suite. So the current hardware suite is three hundred and sixty degree ultrasonic sensors that go off to about just over five meters. It's a forward camera to Ford radar. So we'll make even with just that sensor suite, we can
actually make a huge progress in autonomy. We can certainly make the car steer itself on on a freeway, do lane changes. It's really autonomy is about what level of reliability and safety do you want?
Even with the current sensorus.
We could make the cargo fully autonomous, but only to but not to a level of reliabily that would be safe in say a complex urban environment at thirty miles an hour, where the lanemarking's not there and children could be playing and things could be coming at.
You from the side.
So in order to solve that, you need a bigger sensor suite, and you need more computing power. And I think what you're doing actually with the tigers in the futures is super interesting and will really be a big enabler for autonomous driving. So I think, you know, we're in video is doing really great stuff on that front.
I appreciate that. Yeah, And so some of the challenges that you see, what are the what are some of the technological hurdles that And there's all kinds of researchers in the room, they're all kinds of engineers in room. What are some what are some of the technological hurdles
that you think are really important for us to go tackle. Surely, surely we're going to get to some better cruise controls on highways, but beyond that, what are some of the things that you would like is to go focus on the tackle for the car.
Industry, Well, it's it. You know, where it gets tricky is is just the is that sort of urban environment around thirty or forty miles an hour. So like right right now, it's fairly easy to deal with, say, things that are sub five to ten miles an hour, because we can do that with the ultrasonics. We just make sure it doesn't hit anything right, you know, because you.
Can always just the right thing to do. Largely, that's why would.
You want to hit anything with your exactly, So at five ten miles an hour, you can stop within the range of the ultrasonics, and that then from let's say ten miles an hour to.
You know, call it sort of fifty miles an hour.
That that that that area in complex suburban environments, that's that's where you can get a lot of unexpected things happening, like let's say this of like a road closure or a manhole cover open. Children playing is a big issue bicycles. Once you get about fifty miles an hour and you're in kind of a freeway environment, then it also gets easier again, like the set of possibilities is much reduced, so highway crews is easy. Low speed is easy, intermediate
is hard. And so being able to recognize what you're seeing and make the right decision in the suburban environment in that ten miles an hour to fifty mile an hour zone is the challenging portion. But I really think it's I mean, I almost this may sound a little complacent, but I almost viewed it as like a solve problem, Like we know exactly what.
To do, and we'll be there in a few years.
Right, It's just like Mars. That's quite side. That's kind of the spirit of a I mean, in a lot of ways in your mind, you kind of you kind of see things solvable or arguably arguably solved, and and a lot of it is really about getting there.
Yeah, we'll take autonomous costs for granted, in quite a short period of time. It's amazing how comfortable you get at how quickly you get comfortable with it.
So, now, what.
About government government policies? Like one of the things that I would like to do is I would I would just like to keep working on my email as I'm driving to work. Sure, you know, there's there's a thirty people do that already. Like I said, I would like to do it without without without breaking the law. So where where where do you where do you think government
intervention falls in some of this stuff? Because you know, obviously, if you car drivee by itself and it does it even better than people, you would like it to drive by itself, but largely the laws don't allow you to do that today, right, absolutely, So how do we cross that bridge? And how do you think about government invention regulations?
Right? So, I think.
It'll be from the point at which a car is definitely safer than a person, there's probably at least another two or three years after that before regulators will allow that to be the case, because they will want to see a large amount of statistical proof that it's not
merely as safe as a person, but much safer. So I think what you can do is you can run run it in shadow mode and essentially say, okay, this is this is what the computer would have done in all these circumstances, and was there a crash or was there not?
Like what are the false parts of false negatives?
And then you know, it's achieve a large population group and then and then make a really clear statistical argument with the regulators, and then they're going to digest that, observe it for a while, see if they agree with it, and then I think they will because the evidence will be overwhelming.
Yeah, and the evidence is actually already quite overwhelming that if you, if you, if you would have would have noticed a break line in front of you in the highway and you didn't, you didn't crash into a rear in collision. Right, A lot of laser sate, you know, ideally, ideally, hopefully people don't don't overreact with this, with this unknown technology, and uh and prematurely regulate no premature regulations.
Well, I mean regulation that was a joke.
I think it when when it comes to public safety, I think there's there's an argument for being quite cautious and making sure that things are okay before before there's a change.
And I mean, and I.
Don't think it's the case that right now there's a fully autonomous system and regulators are not approving it, that that that really be a substitute for people. But they will be in a few years now.
As we get more computer rized technology into these cars and this car becomes really a software defined car. I mean a lot of your engineers are software engineers.
I mean that's yeah, absolutely.
One of the great things about Tesla. You guys right here in Silicon Valley, you're rich with software engineers and you have that you' have that computer sensibility about architecting a computer properly, designing the software, properly designing the software for many generations of cars, so where he refines and gets better and better. And it has been getting better. I mean the software from the first time you send me my Tesla to the now it's just like unrecognizable software.
Right, big improvement.
So that's why the first thing we try to do is establish the hardware platform, make sure that we have the sensors and compute power. And so we do that first, even though the software is only taking advantage of a small percentage of the sensors and compute power. And then we do continuous updates to make the car more and more capable.
And we're going to see a lot of that happen later this year.
If I didn't have an announcement on Thursday morning, I would be saying a lot more of it.
Yeah, the audience doesn't understand why they have to wait until Thursday morning. You tweeted it already. You're announce that you're going to do an Ota. What kind of announcement is that I'm going to do an Ota on Thursday. That's like a new product announcement.
These days, it's just it's just a well, it's just saying that there's going to be a cool on Thursday morning, and I'll describe what's going to be in version six point two for anyone who's interested.
That's so awesome. Though I'm interested. I get excited every time I get an Ota, and it's you know, one of the things that was really interesting is in the beginning, when we first built the first Tesla together, the tegra in it, we thought was more than enough. And recently you said, can we just squeeze more performance out of
that platform? And it just happened in literally two years, you know, several versions of your software updates all of a sudden, the computing platform is not powerful enough, right, And it's because you want to add more features, and a lot of features these days are based on software.
True.
Yeah, And so one last question, and it's it has to do with I guess something that a lot of people are very concerned about, which is your car becomes a software platform and software platforms get hacked. How do you think about that, How do you think about security? And what are some of the things that we could do to try to make make make the car more resilient to security attacks.
Yeah, I think that that becomes really important when the cars are fully autonomous. I mean, the way the cars work right now, every system of the car, it's assumed, could actually have a mechanical failure of some kind or a logic failure, a fundamental logic failure. So you can always overwhelm the breaking of the car with your foot,
and you can overwhelm the steering wheel with your hands. So, but but when when there is a steering wheel, or there isn't you know, a brake, pedal or something in that like you know many is from now, then it's really really dangerous, you know, because but even as it is right now, what we spend most of our time on is making sure that it's it's very difficult to
do a multi car hack. Like if you have direct access to a car, just like if you've got direct access to a computer or even a conventional car, you can do a lot of things to it.
But but that's less of.
A concern than somebody being able to hack an arbitrary car or multiple cars. So that's what we focus our energy on is making sure that that in that ways it's it's it's a lot like a like a cell phone or a laptop, you know, you focus on making sure that they can't or that it's very difficult for that to be any kind of system wide hack. So we put a lot of effort into that, and we
have third parties try to attack it. And in certain parts of the car at the very fundamental level, like the drive unit controller or the steering controller have an additional level of security. So somebody may be able to uh, you know, hack something that's cosmetic, but it's much harder to hack something that's that's actually physically agerous.
There's multiple levels of.
Secure and so this way, if you if you weren't able to penetrate maybe the entertainment system, it doesn't allow you quickly as a result of.
That, right, I may display a funny message or something, but it would not you would not be able to then control the steering or the motor.
Yeah. Well, the future of cars is so exciting and the work that you guys are doing are so exciting, and it's it's it's great to see you guys pioneering these computer rized cars. I mean a lot of people think about think about Tesla as the electric car, but I think it's obviously more than that. It's an electric car, but it's a whole computer platform on top of that.
Yeah, I think I think Tess is sort of the leader in electric cars, but I think we'll also sort of be the leader in autonomous cars, at least autonomous cars that people can buy. And and so we're I mean, if there's anybody interested in working on autonomous cars, would love to have you work at Tesla, by the way. So we're gonna put a lot of effort into automotive autonomous driving because it's just going to be the default thing and it could save a lot of lives.
Yeah, so save a lot of lives and hopefully, hopefully one of these days, it would be nice if Nvidia's campus has no parking lot, yeah right, that it drops us off and the meanders off to a place where the land's a little cheaper and you know, and parks a whole bunch of cars there and when it's time to go home, were someone at to.
Come, it will be extremely transformative, that's for sure. But yeah, I mean when it comes to AI, I'm not really worried about narrow AI like like autonomous cars or like you know, a smart air conditioning unit at the house or something. It's more like sort of the deep intelligent stuff that is where we need to be cautious. I
actually think there's many potential flavors of AI. And you know, it's odd that we're at we're so close to the advent of AI, Like it's it seems strange that we would be alive in this in this time.
We'll come back every year, come back every year, and you'll see the work that this group was going to do. I mean, there's so much deep learning work being done here. You have a lot of engineers here as well, and there is fantastics to see the whole community focused on advancing this field. And along the way, we're gonna spin off a whole bunch of new capabilities. As you know, that's gonna make cars just safer and more fun to drive.
Long before we have to get to essentially a self driving car, there's going to be a lot of versions along the way that's just going to bring joy to a lot of people.
Yeah. Absolutely, I just hope there's something left for used humans to do.
Well. I'm not gonna let let go of my steeringwell, you know, I've got mine on the craziness mode and the sports steering mode. Is that the way you have it? You get driven to work? Now?
No, well I drive half the time actually, And which mode do you have it in? I always have it insane mode?
Yeah right, all right, thank you,