News
Tesla’s Elon Musk will be hosting an AI hackathon party at his house
Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be hosting an AI hackathon, together with the company’s artificial intelligence and autopilot team, at his house in four weeks’ time.
The Tesla chief announced his plans via Twitter on Sunday. Despite impressive numbers revealed during the Q4 2019 earnings call and update, Musk and his Tesla team are not resting on their laurels and remain focused on pursuing advancements to its neural network, which is in the center of Tesla’s goal of achieving a full self-driving vehicle.
During the recent Q4 earnings call, an investor asked the Tesla chief executive for updates on FSD.
“I think that’s looking like maybe it’s going to be couple of months from now. And what isn’t obvious regarding Autopilot and Full Self-Driving is just how much work has been going into improving the foundational elements of autonomy,” Musk said.
Tesla will hold a super fun AI party/hackathon at my house with the Tesla AI/autopilot team in about four weeks. Invitations going out soon.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2020
Musk continued to explain how the Tesla team is making great strides in labeling efficiency.
“…in terms of labeling, labeling with video in all eight cameras simultaneously. This is a really, I mean in terms of labeling efficiency, arguably like a three order of magnitude improvement in labeling efficiency. For those who know about this, it’s extremely fundamental, so that’s really great progress on that,” Musk said.
Tesla vehicles rely on a custom chip that boasts of 144 tera operations per second (TOPS) for its self-driving capabilities. This two-chip FSD computer works in tandem with LPDDR4 RAM modules that come with a peak bandwidth of 68 GB/s. There are also two neural network accelerators that work in tandem to process as much as 1TB of data per second. This setup is roughly three times faster, about 80%, and about 1.25 times more power-efficient than the previous hardware. It is also able to process about 2,300 frames per second compared to the 110 frames per second processed by Tesla’s Hardware 2.5.
In his series of tweets on Sunday, Musk also mentioned Tesla’s “Dojo” supercomputer, which is speculated to be capable of processing vast amounts of data to train the company’s neural network. Through active learning, Tesla curates the most useful video clips from its fleet of connected cars and train the neural net to recognize things that it did not previously know.
“Our networks learn from the most complicated and diverse scenarios in the world, iteratively sourced from our fleet of nearly 1M vehicles in real-time. A full build of Autopilot neural networks involves 48 networks that take 70,000 GPU hours to train. Together, they output 1,000 distinct tensors (predictions) at each timestep,” Tesla wrote on the Autopilot AI section of its website.
“At Tesla, using AI to solve self-driving isn’t just icing on the cake, it the cake” – @lexfridman
Join AI at Tesla! It reports directly to me & we meet/email/text almost every day. My actions, not just words, show how critically I view (benign) AI.https://t.co/iF97zvYZRz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2020
The last major software update rolled out by Tesla allowed its vehicles to visualize more things while driving in inner-city streets. Teslas now render stoplights, stop signs, traffic cones, traffic pylons, and more.
With the upcoming AI hackathon, Tesla will get together with developers to seek out more efficient algorithms and overall improvements to the core logic for its Full Self-Driving suite through a time-boxed event. With fresh eyes working with the existing AI and autopilot team of Tesla, the carmaker may be able to accelerate the timeline and rollout of its full-featured Full Self-Driving suite sooner.
Further advances in FSD and its Autopilot feature will widen the gap between Tesla and its competitors and solidify the company’s position as one of the leading automakers in the world. These improvements will also take Tesla a step closer to the possibility of Robotaxis that they can deploy at scale.
The hackathon will also allow Tesla to fish for new AI talents to join the team. On Sunday, Musk also mentioned that the electric carmaker is looking for world-class chip designers and C++/C engineers for vehicle control and other functions of Tesla vehicles.
Musk reiterated that educational attainment is not important when joining Tesla but rather a clear understanding of how AI and neural networks function and the ability to build useful applications using that knowledge.
Elon Musk
Texas township wants The Boring Company to build it a Loop system
The township’s board unanimously approved an application to The Boring Company’s “Tunnel Vision Challenge.”
The Woodlands Township, Texas, has formally entered The Boring Company’s tunneling sweepstakes.
The township’s board unanimously approved an application to The Boring Company’s “Tunnel Vision Challenge,” which offers up to one mile of tunnel construction at no cost to a selected community.
The Woodlands’ proposal, dubbed “The Current,” features two parallel 12-foot-diameter tunnels beneath the Town Center corridor near The Waterway. Teslas would shuttle passengers between Waterway Square, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, Town Green Park and nearby hotels during concerts and large-scale events, as noted in a Chron report.
Township officials framed the tunnel as a solution for the township’s traffic congestion issues. The Pavilion alone hosts more than 60 shows each year and can accommodate crowds of up to 16,500, often straining Lake Robbins Drive and surrounding intersections.
“We know we have traffic impacts and pedestrian movement challenges, especially in the Town Center area,” Chris Nunes, chief operating officer of The Woodlands Township, stated during the meeting.
“The Current” mirrors the Loop system operating beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center, where Tesla vehicles transport passengers through underground tunnels between venues and resorts.
The Boring Company issued its request for proposals (RFP) in mid-January, inviting cities and districts to pitch local uses for its tunneling technology. The Woodlands must submit its application by Feb. 23, though no timeline has been provided for when a winning community will be announced.
Nunes confirmed that the board has authorized a submission for “The Current’s” proposal, though he emphasized that the project is still in its preliminary stages.
“The Woodlands Township Board of Directors has authorized staff to submit an application to The Boring Company, which has issued an RFP for communities interested in leveraging their technology to address community challenges,” he said in a statement.
“The Board believes that an underground tunnel would provide a safe and efficient means to transport people to and from various high-use community amenities in our Town Center.”
News
Tesla Model Y wins 2026 Drive Car of the Year award in Australia
The Model Y is already Australia’s best-selling EV in 2025 and the tenth best-selling vehicle overall.
The Tesla Model Y has been named 2026 Drive Car of the Year overall winner, taking the top honor after being judged as the vehicle that “moves the game forward the most for Australian new car buyers.”
The Model Y is already Australia’s best-selling EV in 2025 and the tenth best-selling vehicle overall, but the vehicle’s Juniper update strengthened its case with new ownership benefits and expanded software capability.
Drive’s overall award compares category winners and looks at which model most significantly advances the local new car market. In 2026, judges pointed to the Model Y’s five-year warranty and the availability of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) as a monthly subscription as key differentiators.
Priced from AU$58,900 before on-road costs, the all-electric crossover SUV offers a lot of value compared to similarly sized petrol and hybrid rivals. The ability to access Tesla’s Supercharger network across Australia also reduces friction for buyers moving to EV ownership.
Owners can add FSD (Supervised) for AU$149 per month. While it still requires driver oversight, the system expands the vehicle’s advanced driver-assistance capabilities and reflects Tesla’s software-first approach.
“The default choice for a reason. The Tesla Model Y makes the transition to electric both effortless and rewarding,” Drive wrote.
The 2025 Model Y facelift also sharpened the vehicle’s exterior, highlighted by a distinctive rear light bar that gives the crossover SUV a more modern road presence.
Drive described the Model Y as a benchmark for combining practicality, efficiency and technology at an accessible price point. With eligibility for federal Fringe Benefit Tax exemptions through novated leasing, its value proposition has improved for numerous buyers.
For 2026, the Model Y’s combination of range efficiency, charging access and software capability proved decisive. Ultimately, the award all but cements the Model Y’s position as one of the most influential vehicles in Australia’s evolving new-car market today.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk reiterates rapid Starship V3 timeline with next launch in sight
Musk shared the update in a brief post on X, writing, “Starship flies again next month.”
Elon Musk has confirmed that Starship will fly again next month, reiterating SpaceX’s aggressive timeline for the first launch of its Starship V3 rocket.
Musk shared the update in a brief post on X, writing, “Starship flies again next month.” The CEO’s post was accompanied by a video of Starship’s Super Heavy booster being successfully caught by a launch tower in Starbase, Texas.
The timeline is notable. In late January, Musk stated that Starship’s next flight, Flight 12, was expected in about six weeks. This placed the expected mission date sometime in March. That estimate aligned with SpaceX’s earlier statement that Starship’s 12th flight test “remains targeted for the first quarter of 2026.”
If the vehicle does indeed fly next month, it would mark the debut of Starship V3, the upgraded platform expected to feature the rocket’s new Raptor V3 engines.
Raptor V3 is designed to deliver significantly higher thrust than earlier versions while reducing cost and weight. Starship V3 itself is expected to be optimized for manufacturability, a critical step if SpaceX intends to scale production toward frequent launches for Starlink, lunar missions, and eventually Mars.
Starship V3 is widely viewed as the version that transitions the program from experimental testing to true operational scaling. Previous iterations have completed multiple integrated flight tests, with mixed outcomes but steady progress. Expectations are high that SpaceX is now working on Starship’s refinement.
An aggressive launch schedule supports several priorities at once. It advances Starlink’s next-generation satellite deployment, supports NASA’s lunar ambitions under Artemis, and keeps SpaceX on track for its longer-term Moon and Mars objectives.