Tesla is hosting AI Day late Thursday to promote its AI prowess mainly to engineers even as U.S. senators have urged the Federal Trade Commission to probe the company’s self-driving claims.
In a letter to the FTC sent on Wednesday, Senate Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Edward Markey said Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have “persistently misrepresented the capabilities of its cars.” Statements about self-driving abilities of Tesla cars have put Tesla driver and the public at “risk of serious injury or death,” they said.
Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a formal investigation into Tesla’s technology related to 11 crashes where Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control was involved. One person died and 17 others were injured in the crashes going back to 2018. NHTSA said about 700,000 Tesla vehicles use the technologies that it is investigating.
RELATED: Feds probe Tesla Autopilot over 11 crashes, one fatal
Tesla did not respond to a request by Fierce Electronics to comment on the probe and related matters.
Germany has banned Tesla from using the term “autopilot” to describe its self-driving capabilities.
AI Day is invitation-only, but an invitation posted by website Electrek says Musk is expected to give keynote remarks, while engineers will demo hardware and software starting at 5 p.m. PT at Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Participants will also be able to test-ride Tesla’ new Model S Plaid. There is a hint of a discussion of Tesla’s neural networking training supercomputer called Project Dojo. Tesla is also expected to talk about what’s next for AI at Tesla beyond its vehicle fleet.
Musk has repeatedly said Tesla cars will reach Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021, although they are now at Level 2 automation, which means drivers must have their hands on the steering wheel while the car actively steers, accelerates and brakes when on highways. Level 5 means cars can drive themselves anywhere, under all conditions and without human supervision, which NHTSA said will not be available until 2025.
Even though government pressure is mounting on Tesla over safety matters, the company’s stock rose 4% by mid-day Wednesday. Engineers widely hail Tesla as a market leader in electric vehicles and automation. A recent HyperChange 20 podcaster who has attended previous Tesla events described Tesla as “the most cutting-edge AI company in the world.”
Musk has previously called Dojo a “beast” that will lead to a “quantum leap’ in autonomous driving. But there are multiple competitors in the AI space.
Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq, a provider of a Quantum Algorithm Design platform, said “Dojo is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Classiq foresees advances in quantum hardware and software “to vastly outperform supercomputers to solve an array of financial, logistic and other hard problems,” he added in a statement. Enterprises that contact Classiq are involved in the high-performance computing field and want to expand abilities to solve more challenging computational problems and reduce costs.