This past weekend I watched Tesla's AI Day video (3.5 hours) and it blew
my mind.  You can see it on YouTube; just skip the first 14 minutes of
Muzak to get to the content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODSJsviD_SU

If you don't have 3.5 hours to spare, here are some abridged versions
at 23 and 14.5 minutes, respectively:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suv8ex8xlZA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=537cbxoFtOs

One of the things I learned was that the computer in their cars is
running a bunch of neural nets totaling one billion parameters.  That is
some very serious compute power.  Also, their lane detection model was
trained on 5 million hours of manually labeled video.  Imagine what that
must have cost.

Another interesting thing: while you're driving manually, the Autopilot
software is still running and computing driving strategy.  If you do
something it wouldn't have done, it records it for Tesla to possibly use
as training data.  They gave an example of detecting a car stopped at
the entrance to an intersection.  Autopilot wanted to slow and yield to
the car, but the human driver recognized that the car was unoccupied and
drove right past it.  This provided training data that will make their
"parked car" detector a little smarter.

They're also building their own supercomputers now with incredible
density and power.  While testing the thing they accidentally brought
down the local power substation and got a call from the county.

And then there's the Optimus robot.  Last year it was a guy in robot
suit.  This year it's an honest-to-goodness walking humanoid with
dextrous hands.  It runs the same software suite as the car (for
obstacle detection, path planning, etc.)  Musk is talking about a $20K
price tag when they mass produce it, which is insane.  He also says
deliveries are expected to begin in 3-5 years.  No one else is making a
robot this capable and this cheap.  Even if he can't achieve the
promised cost and delivery date, this thing is eventually going to be
wildly disruptive.

We really do live in interesting times.

-- Dave