Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Become One Of World's Largest AI Companies, Hints Google Is Far Ahead

Tesla Inc TSLA is hard at work to bring autonomy to their electric vehicle fleet. The cars have all hardware necessary for autonomous driving, but the software needs work to catch up. Tesla currently has a limited release of their "Full Self Driving Beta" software available to a small set of testers.

Responding on Twitter, CEO Elon Musk said he believes Tesla will become one of the largest AI companies in the world. This is in relation to Tesla's autonomous vehicle approach. Musk said "...it turns out that the only way to solve self-driving is to solve a big part of real-world AI," when responding about Tesla's self-driving work.

Musk also said, "Unless a company is good at AI with tight compute, it’s hopeless. This is insanely hard."

Certainly one of the largest. A company whose name rhymes with Shmoogle is pretty far ahead.

But I think we’re the leader in shallow-minded AI haha!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2021

Many companies are working on autonomous vehicles. Most companies use a combination of LiDAR, cameras and radar. Tesla is going to remove radar from the equation and use cameras only.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc GOOG, is working on autonomous vehicles using many different types of sensors. Waymo has vehicles that currently act as a taxi with no driver, but the service is region locked to a small area in Phoenix, Arizona.

It seems Musk believes Google is also advancing in AI. While not naming them directly, he said, "A company whose name rhymes with Shmoogle is pretty far ahead," in reference to artificial intelligence. Google has created such software as DeepMind and AlphaGo, impressive demonstrations of AI in real-world and theoretical situations.

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Photo courtesy of Tesla.