Tesla AI Day Gets A Boost With UCLA Professor Tweet Of Advanced Chip

Tesla Inc's TSLA AI day is coming August 19. CEO Elon Musk said it is mostly a recruiting event, but many are still hoping for some new information about Tesla's autonomy strategy, updates on the upcoming Dojo supercomputer, and more.

Now a new hint has emerged from Dennis Hong, a Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering professor at UCLA. Hong tweeted a picture of a stacked computer chip with many different components. No details were given, and when asked for more info, Hong replied "can’t say anything just yet…"

Speculation in the comments below Hong's post point towards excitement for an update on Dojo, Tesla's super computer that will be used to train its self-driving neural network software. The specs revealed by Tesla's senior director of AI Andrej Karpathy would put Dojo as the world's 5th most powerful super computer. 

In a September 2020 tweet, Musk mentioned Tesla would be using its own custom chips and computer architecture. If Tesla is ready to reveal Dojo, this could the public's first glimpse of what makes up that computer.

Benzinga's take: Overall, none of the responses have a complete guess as to what each piece in the picture represents.

Two conclusions are clear. The first is that this chip will use a lot of power and will require a lot of cooling.

The second is that AI day will be an incredibly interesting event for Tesla, and could bring a leap forward in neural net compute technology. 

Photo of Supercharger courtesy of Tesla