Recently, Elon Musk made some intriguing remarks during an earnings call: What if Tesla’s unused car computer power could be used for AI tasks, similar to what Amazon does with AWS? Though theoretical, this concept raises issues of viability and usefulness, underlining Musk’s preference for an innovative yet practical vision.
Musk compares the millions of idle Tesla cars to nodes in an enormous distributed computer network that could hold 100 gigawatts of inference computation, drawing comparisons to Amazon’s cloud service.
As tempting as it may appear to use idle resources, there are real-world implications as well. Would Tesla pay the owners of the vehicles for this? The ethical concerns remain, evoking memories of GM’s data-sharing scandals. But first, we need to talk about feasibility before we talk about ethics.
Former Perceptive Automata technology officer Sam Anthony says the idea is technically possible but points out practical difficulties. Challenges include the batteries and connection of electric vehicles, and real-time responsiveness is required for inference employment possibilities. Anthony is concerned about whether using automobiles as voluntary computing nodes is feasible.
Utilising idle computing capacity has been practical in the past through distributed computing initiatives like SETI@home. However, issues with scalability and coordination still exist. Professor of electrical engineering Phil Koopman suggests rigorous experimental validation while acknowledging potential feasibility but highlighting scaling challenges.
Musk sees a world where automobiles function with widespread computer resources, which is consistent with his futuristic outlook on autonomous vehicles. But bringing an idea to life necessitates carefully weighing the logistical and technical details. As Musk’s ideas grow, practical analysis is still crucial despite the concept’s uniqueness.
“For now, it is an interesting idea,” Koopman reflects, “but we need to keep in mind that most cool ideas like this do not pencil out to be practical.”