Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently thanked Ashok Elluswamy, the head of Tesla AI/Autopilot team. In a recent post on X, formerly, Twitter, Musk thanked Ashok for his contribution to Tesla. “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!, wrote Musk.
He quoted a post from Ashok, where he had credited Musk for being “the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla.” He further added, “He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time.” Ashok then went on to share examples of Musk’s contribution over the years, starting from 2014.
Here’s are some details about Ashok as shared on his LinkedIn profile:
1. Ashok leads the autonomy software team for the Tesla Autopilot. Here’s how he describes his team’s “main focus areas are”:
– Creation of large scale automatic ground truth pipelines to train neural networks with massive amounts of diverse, high-quality data. Use this fleet-learning approach to replace potentially brittle run-time algorithms with robust learned models.
– Developing an accurate and detailed geometric and semantic understanding of the world using the best of both machine-learned and engineered models.
– Building robust, causal, predictive models for other agents in both geometry and semantic state spaces.
– Decision making, motion planning, and control modules using state-of-the-art AI techniques including methods for high-dimensional search, trajectory optimization, reinforcement learning, model-predictive control, etc.
2. As per his LinkedIn profile, Ashok is a robotics engineer with experience in computer vision and perception through planning and control. He joined Tesla in the year 2014.
3. He did his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai.
4. Ashok studied robotics systems development at Carnegie Mellon University in the US.
5. Before Tesla, Ashok has worked with WABCO Vehicle Control Systems and Volkswagen.