Elon Musk introduces Ashok, the techie who leads Tesla AI

Elon Musk has introduced an Indian-origin techie Ashok Elluswamy, who was the first to be hired on Tesla’s autopilot team and currently leads its social media platform X (earlier Twitter). In a thank you note, the tech billionaire also offered him his due credit for the car maker’s “success in AI” as well as autopilot software.

What Elon Musk said about Ashok Elluswamy

Musk wrote: “Thanks Ashok!
Ashok was the first person to join the Tesla AI/Autopilot team and ultimately rose to lead all AI/Autopilot software.
Without him and our awesome team, we would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that doesn’t exist.
Btw, I never suggested that he say anything and I had no idea he wrote this until I saw it 10 mins ago!”

In the post, Musk also shared a link to an article written by Elluswamy on X. This article highlights how the Tesla CEO has been “the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla.”

What Ashok Elluswamy said about Elon Musk and AI

Elluswamy wrote: “He [Musk] has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time.”
Back in 2014, Autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer that only had ~384 KB of memory and puny computing (didn’t even have native floating point arithmetic). He asked the engineering team to implement lane keeping, lane changing, longitudinal control for vehicles, curvature, etc. Many, even in the team, thought that the request was crazy. Nonetheless, he never gave up and pushed the team to achieve this very difficult goal. In 2015, beyond all odds, Tesla shipped the world’s first Autopilot system. The second closest such product only came to market many years later.
In 2016, Tesla started doing all of the computer vision required for Autopilot in-house instead of depending on external vendors. Many people thought it was insane to bet the product on developing the vision system from scratch within a few months, which had taken other companies a decade or more. Yet, we achieved this target within eleven months. This was a strategically important move that started the development of a strong AI team at Tesla.
Not only did he push for strong AI software, but also for powerful AI hardware. Tesla, which others thought was just a car company, was making custom silicon to run neural networks efficiently. This hardware which was originally designed in 2017, came into production in February 2019 and remains extremely competitive with hardware coming out to date. For reference, this five-year-old AI computer has roughly 8x the AI inference compute as the state-of-the-art Apple M3 chip. It is still able to run the latest end-to-end neural networks built on top of the latest AI technology.
He was the one who bet on vision and AI to solve autonomy instead of relying on sensor crutches and high-definition maps. For anyone who has experienced the latest versions of FSD, it might be obvious that it can see all the important things and drive the car based on pure vision. However, back in 2020 and earlier it wasn’t obvious to most. In fact, many “experts” in the field ridiculed Tesla and Elon for these choices. We have proved them wrong by shipping supervised FSD to millions of cars and shown that with good AI software, the car is able to handle the complexities of city driving such as making turns, handling intersections, yielding to pedestrians etc., just by seeing outside. In fact, we even removed the radars and ultrasonics to just really focus on the heart of the problem, which is AI. Today, it’s almost paradoxical that Teslas have the least amount of raw sensors, yet have the most autonomous capability compared to any production car. Pulling off such a contrary bet was only possible because of his extreme conviction and deep understanding of this problem.
He kickstarted the work on humanoid robots at Tesla in 2021, again before any ChatGPT or other obvious examples of the rise of AI. Just like vehicle autonomy, Optimus is also being developed to be competent, scalable, and cost-effective in order to widely serve the world.”