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Earlier, Ashok Elluswamy expressed his gratitude for Elon Musk on X. “Elon Musk has been the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla. He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time.” He said.
Elon Musk and Ashok Elluswamy
New Delhi: Elon Musk on Sunday praised Indian-origin Ashok Elluswamy, the first person hired for Tesla’s autopilot team. Tesla CEO took to X to applaud Ashok’s contribution to Tesla’s “success in AI and autopilot software”.
“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 minutes ago!” Elon Musk said on X.
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… https://t.co/7eBfzu0Nci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2024
It all started when Ashok Elluswamy expressed his gratitude for Elon Musk on X. “Elon Musk has been the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla. He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time,” he said.
Ashok, in a note, talked about the instance when the autopilot project was started in 2014. He wrote, “Back in 2014, Autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer that only had ~384 KB of memory and puny compute (didn’t even have native floating-point arithmetic). He [Elon Musk] 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.”
Ashok further added, “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.”
Praising Elon Musk, he added, “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 that was originally designed in 2017, came to production in February 2019 and remains extremely competitive with hardware coming out to date.”
He said, “He [Elon Musk] was the one who bet on vision and AI to solve autonomy instead of relying on sensor crutches and high-definition maps.” Mr Ashok noted that by shipping millions of Teslas the company has proved all of them wrong, who used to ridicule Elon Musk and the company.
Later, Elon Musk re-shared Ashok Elluswamy’s post and praised the autopilot engineer.
