Friday, August 17, 2018

"Nvidia CEO is 'more than happy to help' if Tesla's A.I. chip doesn't pan out" (NVDA; TSLA)

No word on whether Mr. Huang will participate in the upcoming Elon intervention but this could be helpful.
From CNBC:
  • Nvidia's Xavier system for supporting autonomous vehicles is in production, CEO Jensen Huang said.
  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously talked up his company's upcoming Autopilot processor.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company has chips that are ready for autonomous driving, responding to a potential threat posed by Tesla's eventual entrance into the market.

During a conference call on Thursday following Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter earnings report, Huang was asked by an analyst to discuss Tesla's desire to stop relying on Nvidia's silicon in favor of its own customer artificial intelligence chip. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this month that he was "a big fan of Nvidia" but suggested that Tesla's chip would be able to outperform certain Nvidia graphics cards.

The two companies, which have very different specialties, could be on a collision course as AI plays a bigger role in the future of autonomous driving.

Huang said that Nvidia's Xavier technology for autonomous machines is in production and customers are "super excited" about it. If Tesla's own Autopilot chip initiative doesn't work out, Nvidia would be "more than happy to help," he said.

Here's the entirety of Huang's comments on its collaboration with Tesla and the electric car maker's chip project:...MORE
Related

Yesterday 
Ahead of NVIDIA Earnings: The Last of the "Easy" Comparisons (NVDA)
...Going forward the trend toward specialist proprietary chips, see Tesla's development of their own chips etc, etc will leave NVIDIA with a couple holes in the potential addressable markets they will want to fill....

August 6 
"Tesla says it’s dumping Nvidia chips for a homebrew alternative" (TSLA)
Tesla has been saying similar stuff for a while now.*
This bit was in the conference call but Ars fleshes it out some.....

*Our thinking last September hasn't changed much:
NVIDIA Partner Tesla Reportedly Developing Chip With AMD (TSLA; NVDA; AMD)
Today in leveraged WTFs....

And December 2017:
"During a talk at a private party, Elon Musk said Tesla is developing specialized AI hardware "'That we think will be the best in the world;" (TSLA)

And April 2017 
We've said NVIDIA probably has a couple year head start but this bears watching, so to speak....
***
The only reason for Tesla to do this is that NVIDIA's chips are general purpose whereas specialized chips are making inroads in stuff like crypto mining (ASICs), Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for machine learning and Facebook's hardware efforts.

In May, 2018 we met a person who knows about this stuff:

 AI VC: "We Are Here To Create"
Sometimes the competition is just plain intimidating/scary/resistance-is-futile, smart.
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