Despite being a staunch critic of artificial intelligence (AI), Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hired the technology and turning it into a subordinate that would report directly to him on a daily basis.

Musk, who has crossed swords with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma over the role of AI, is now finally giving the technology some space, like in his startup Neuralink which is creating a brain-machine interface.

Tagging Lex Fridman, popular host of the artificial intelligence podcast on YouTube, Musk tweeted: “At Tesla, using AI to solve self-driving isn’t just icing on the cake, it the cake.”

He further added, “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.”

For him, AI can only do ‘benign’ tasks and those jobs to are being evaluated critically by him.

Tesla is using advanced AI for vision and planning, supported by efficient use of inference hardware to achieve a general solution to full self-driving.

The company is building silicon chips that power its full self-driving software from the ground up, taking every small architectural and micro-architectural improvement into account while pushing hard to squeeze maximum silicon performance-per-watt.

The company is applying cutting-edge research to train deep neural networks on problems ranging from perception to control.

According to Tesla, “Our per-camera networks analyse raw images to perform semantic segmentation, object detection and monocular depth estimation. Our birds-eye-view networks take video from all cameras to output the road layout, static infrastructure and 3D objects directly in the top-down view.”

“Our networks learn from the most complicated and diverse scenarios in the world, iteratively sourced from our fleet of nearly 1 million 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,” the electric carmaker added.

Tesla is also developing core algorithms that drive the car by creating a high-fidelity representation of the world and planning trajectories in that space. During a recent presentation about Neuralink’s brain-machine interface technology, he said: “Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind.”

“Hopefully, it is a benign scenario. But I think with a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface we can go along for the ride. And we can effectively have the option of merging with AI,” concluded Musk.

AI Hackathon At Elon’s

Elon Musk will also be opening his home to coders and engineers next month, in order to attract AI talent to help in pushing forward Tesla’s autonomous driving ambitions. The tech billionaire tweeted on Sunday where he announced the “super fun AI party/hackathon” at his house in four weeks.

Also Read: New Research Exposes Vulnerabilities In Lidar-Based Autonomous Vehicles

He wrote, “All that matters is a deep understanding of AI and the ability to implement neural networks in a way that is useful.” 

Tha hackathon appears to be a part of a wider recruitment drive for Tesla’s autonomous driving program. Autopilot was also a topic for discussion during Tesla’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday last week, as Musk was forced to walk back his previous claim that Tesla vehicles would be capable of “feature-complete full self-driving” without any human assistance by the end of 2019.

Musk said, “It’s looking like we might be feature-complete in a few months.” Elaborating on that, he said, “Feature complete means it has some chance of going from your home to work, let’s say with no interventions. It doesn’t mean the features are working well.”

Currently, Tesla’s autopilot feature allows the car to “steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane,” according to the company’s website, but still requires “active driver supervision.”

The safety of Tesla’s Autopilot has come under increasing scrutiny since it launched. According to news, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched a total of 14 investigations into crashes involving Teslas on Autopilot at least three of which have involved fatalities. Along with that last month, US Senator Edward Markey urged the company to rebrand the feature, saying it has an “inherently misleading name.”