Indian origin engineer and Tesla employee Ashok Elluswamy recently took to social media platform X to make everyone away of how Elon Musk and his decisions were the primary reasons for the success of Tesla. Elluswamy, while stating that Elon Musk was the key driver of artificial intelligence and autonomy at Tesla, said that businessman and investor strived for excellence and encouraged employees to achieve great things when ideas related to modern technologies appeared seemingly impossible. He went on to highlight some of the major inflection points of the company, and difficult decisions that Elon Musk took at the time.
“Back in 2014, Autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer with only about 384 KB of memory and minimal computing power (it didn’t even have native floating point arithmetic). Despite these limitations, Elon Musk asked the engineering team to implement lane keeping, lane changing, longitudinal control for vehicles, curvature detection, and more. Many, even within the team, thought this request was crazy. Nonetheless, Musk never gave up and pushed the team to achieve this very challenging goal. In 2015, against all odds, Tesla shipped the world’s first Autopilot system. The second closest such product only came to market many years later,” said Elluswamy.
Elon Musk Push for AI in Tesla
Ashok Elluswamy also highlighted what Musk did for the adoption of AI in Tesla. In 2016, Tesla made a groundbreaking move by taking all computer vision development for Autopilot in-house, breaking away from reliance on external vendors. The audacious goal of developing a state-of-the-art vision system from scratch within months, something that had taken other companies a decade, seemed insane to many, he added. However, against all odds, Tesla achieved this feat in just eleven months, marking a pivotal moment that catalyzed the growth of a formidable AI team within the company, he observed.
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“I could go on, but plainly, Elon is critical for Tesla’s success in AI. It is his combination of deep technical understanding, insane perseverance and relentless hard work that have positioned Tesla to be a leader in real-world AI. Elon’s technical intuition to make these important decisions way before others see it is unmatched. If not for Elon’s ambition, Tesla might have dwindled to become just another car company. In the future, fully autonomous cars and useful household robots will be common place and the world will think that this was how it was always supposed to be. Until then, we need Elon Musk to push the frontier, because he sees it already,” said Elluswamy.
According to him, Elon Musk didn’t just push for robust AI software; he also championed the creation of powerful AI hardware. Defying the perception that Tesla was merely a car company, the firm began developing custom silicon to efficiently run neural networks. This hardware, initially designed in 2017, entered production in February 2019 and remains highly competitive, boasting roughly eight times the AI inference compute of the state-of-the-art Apple M3 chip. Even five years later, it can run the latest end-to-end neural networks, built on the cutting edge of AI technology, he says.
Musk’s vision centered on solving autonomy through AI and vision, rather than relying on sensor crutches and high-definition maps. While the capabilities of Full Self-Driving (FSD) may seem obvious today, back in 2020 and earlier, many experts ridiculed Tesla’s approach. Musk’s commitment to pure vision-based driving proved them wrong, as supervised FSD was rolled out to millions of cars, demonstrating the car’s ability to navigate complex city driving scenarios—making turns, handling intersections, yielding to pedestrians—using just its vision systems. Tesla even removed radars and ultrasonics to focus entirely on AI, making the company’s cars the most autonomous with the least amount of raw sensors.
“In 2021, Musk initiated work on humanoid robots at Tesla, anticipating the rise of AI even before the advent of technologies like ChatGPT. Just as with vehicle autonomy, the Optimus robot project aims to be competent, scalable, and cost-effective, designed to widely serve the world. Elon Musk’s extreme conviction and deep,” adds the Tesla engineer.
Must responded the post of appreciation saying: “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.”
