How expensive and difficult does hyperscale-class AI training have to be for a maker of self-driving electric cars to take a side excursion to spend how many hundreds of millions of dollars to go off and create its own AI supercomputer from scratch? And how egotistical and sure would the company’s founder have to be to put together a team that could do it?
Like many questions, when you ask these precisely, they tend to answer themselves. And what is clear is that Elon Musk, founder of both SpaceX and Tesla as well as a co-founder of the OpenAI consortium, doesn’t have time – or money – to waste on science projects.
Just like the superpowers of the world underestimated the amount of computing power it would take to fully simulate a nuclear missile and its explosion, perhaps the makers of self-driving cars are coming to the realization that teaching a car to drive itself in a complex world that is always changing is going to take a lot more supercomputing. And once you reconcile yourself to that, then you start from scratch and build the right machine to do this specific job.
