Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again shared an innovative idea involving the company’s products. During the Q&A section of Tesla’s recent earnings call, Musk proposed using 100 million Tesla vehicles to create a “giant distributed inference fleet.”
The concept is as ambitious as it sounds. Musk wondered aloud whether the upcoming chip Tesla is developing “might almost be too much intelligence for a car.” This led him to pitch a vision he’s apparently been considering for some time:
“One of the things I thought,” Musk explained, “If we’ve got all of these cars that maybe are bored, we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet. If they’re not actively driving, at some point, with 100 million cars in the fleet and each having, say, a kilowatt of inference capability, that’s 100 gigawatts of inference distributed, with cooling and power conversion taken care of. So, that seems like a pretty significant asset.”
At first glance, the idea doesn’t seem far-fetched. Modern vehicles, especially those equipped with cutting-edge chips, possess significant processing power that often goes underutilized beyond supporting Tesla’s autonomous driving systems — a feature the company still appears to be refining.
Linking millions of Tesla cars together for distributed computing could resemble projects like SETI@home, which leverage idle processing resources across a network of devices. Such a platform might transform Tesla’s fleet into a powerful tool for AI tasks or other computationally intensive projects.
However, there are some practical considerations. It seems likely Musk envisions privately-owned customer cars connected to a central server via their internet connections, rather than warehouses stacked with Tesla-owned vehicles running computations. If that’s the case, convincing private vehicle owners to use their car’s battery and electrical systems to power these AI chips could be a tough proposition.
There’s also the potential downside of increased wear on the vehicle’s hardware, as chips working constantly on complex AI tasks could shorten their lifespan. And what about the cost to the owners in terms of electricity consumption?
Perhaps a profit-sharing scheme or other incentives could make the idea more appealing to Tesla owners. While this is just speculation, it highlights the challenges and creativity involved in Musk’s thinking.
Ultimately, this discussion showcases Elon Musk’s penchant for big ideas and pushing boundaries — even if they’re not yet ready for mass adoption. Whether or not Tesla’s distributed inference fleet comes to fruition, it’s an intriguing glimpse into how the company might leverage its massive network of vehicles in the future.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/elon-musk-suggested-a-novel-use-for-bored-tesla-cars-during-a-recent-earnings-call-combining-their-processing-power-to-create-a-huge-distributed-100-gigawatt-ai-inference-fleet/
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