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Tesla’s Elon Musk will be hosting an AI hackathon party at his house

Tesla Autopilot (Source: Elon Musk | Twitter)

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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.

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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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A curious soul who keeps wondering how Elon Musk, Tesla, electric cars, and clean energy technologies will shape the future, or do we really need to escape to Mars.

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JB Straubel’s Redwood launches energy business focused on second-life EV batteries

Redwood stated that many EV battery packs retain more than 50% of their capacity after being retired from vehicles.

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Credit: Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling firm founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, has launched a new venture called Redwood Energy. The business aims to repurpose used electric vehicle batteries into large-scale, low-cost energy storage systems.

In a post on X, Redwood revealed that it has already deployed a 12 MW, 63 MWh microgrid powered entirely by second-life EV batteries. The system is currently powering a modular data center for Crusoe AI, and it already operates at a lower cost than conventional solutions.

Repurposed batteries for scalable storage

Redwood Energy is designed to bridge the gap between battery recovery and recycling by extracting value from discarded EV packs that still hold usable charge. In a blog post, Redwood stated that many EV battery packs retain more than 50% of their capacity after being retired from vehicles. That remaining energy is well suited for stationary storage applications even without recycling.

The process begins with Redwood’s collection and diagnostics system, which identifies battery packs that are still suitable for reuse. Those packs are then integrated into modular energy systems that can store energy from solar, wind, or the grid. Once the batteries reach true end-of-life, they are recycled through Redwood’s closed-loop system to recover critical minerals.

Meeting the demands of an AI-driven grid

Redwood estimates that more than 100,000 EVs will be retired this year in the United States, with millions more currently on the road. These vehicles represent hundreds of gigawatt-hours of storage potential. These resources are coming in at the right time, as electricity demand is rising rapidly amid the rise of artificial intelligence, which tends to be power-hungry.

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Redwood Energy already has more than 1 GWh of second-life batteries in its deployment pipeline. That figure is expected to grow to 5 GWh in the coming year. Larger 100 MW projects are also in development.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla gets $475 price target from Benchmark amid initial Robotaxi rollout

Tesla’s limited rollout of its Robotaxi service in Austin is already catching the eye of Wall Street.

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Credit: Tesla

Venture capital firm Benchmark recently reiterated its “Buy” rating and raised its price target on Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) from $350 to $475 per share, citing the company’s initial Robotaxi service deployment as a sign of future growth potential.

Benchmark analyst Mickey Legg praised the Robotaxi service pilot’s “controlled and safety-first approach,” adding that it could help Tesla earn the trust of regulators and the general public.

Confidence in camera-based autonomy

Legg reiterated Benchmark’s belief in Tesla’s vision-only approach to autonomous driving. “We are a believer in Tesla’s camera-focused approach that is not only cost effective but also scalable,” he noted. 

The analyst contrasted Tesla’s simple setup with the more expensive hardware stacks used by competitors like Waymo, which use various sophisticated sensors that hike up costs, as noted in an Investing.com report. Compared to Tesla’s Model Y Robotaxis, Waymo’s self-driving cars are significantly more expensive.

He also pointed to upcoming Texas regulations set to take effect in September, suggesting they could help create a regulatory framework favorable to autonomous services in other cities.

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“New regulations for autonomous vehicles are set to go into place on Sept. 1 in TX that we believe will further help win trust and pave the way for expansion to additional cities,” the analyst wrote.

https://twitter.com/herbertong/status/1938287117441855616?s=10

Tesla as a robotics powerhouse

Beyond robotaxis, Legg sees Tesla evolving beyond its roots as an electric vehicle maker. He noted that Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, could be a long-term growth driver alongside new vehicle programs and other future initiatives.

“In our view, the company is undergoing an evolution from a trailblazing vehicle OEM to a high-tech automation and robotics company with unmatched domestic manufacturing scale,” he wrote.

Benchmark noted that Tesla stock had rebounded over 50% from its April lows, driven in part by easing tariff concerns and growing momentum around autonomy. With its initial Robotaxi rollout now underway, the firm has returned to its previous $475 per share target and reaffirmed TSLA as a Benchmark Top Pick for 2025.

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Tesla is testing a new way to eliminate a rare but concerning Supercharger issue

Tesla is testing a new way to end a rare issue at Superchargers, and its internal pilot program has already started.

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tesla supercharger
Credit: Tesla

Tesla is now testing a new way to eliminate a rare but concerning issue that can arise at Superchargers, especially as the company’s vehicles become more popular.

Tesla’s Supercharger Network is the most robust in the world, but the company has opened it up to other manufacturers, which makes the network even more congested than it already is.

Superchargers are continually being built, and existing stations are undergoing expansion in congested areas. However, there is one rare issue that still arises from time to time, and that’s the case of drivers cutting in line to charge before another vehicle that arrived before they did.

Tesla is rolling out a new ‘Supercharger queue’ in an effort to end one issue

A few months ago, Tesla said it would start testing a “virtual queuing” system that would tell cars what their position is in line. This would eliminate any instances of confusion between drivers and would also keep cutters from butting in front of those who arrived before them.

Now, Tesla is officially testing the program, according to Max de Zegher, the company’s North American charging head:

Public pilots will begin soon at select sites after Tesla completes its internal testing. Admittedly, this is an incredibly rare issue, but it is something that is worth confronting because it will eliminate confrontations at Superchargers.

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