身家只綁股價！特斯拉執行長 Elon Musk 去年年薪是 0 元
知名電動車製造商特斯拉（Tesla）執行長 Elon Musk 的 2020 年薪資條下來了，金額是 0 元——馬斯克的薪資可以說是被公司逐年大幅降低，他 2018 年的年薪是 5 萬多美金，2019 年的年薪卻只剩 2 萬多美金。
根據上週五（13 日）美國證券交易委員會（Securities and Exchange Commission，通常使用縮寫 SEC）所公佈的文件，特斯拉公司提交的資料顯示，執行長伊隆．馬斯克 2020 年的總薪資為 0；但財務長克宏（Zachary Kirkhorn）2020 年的年薪（含現金及股票分紅）則高達 4,660 萬美元，比他 2019 年薪酬 2,124 萬的兩倍還多！
特斯拉公司的申報資料一向是大家關注的焦點，也有該公司（或者說執行長本人）獨家的幽默在裡頭。例如，特斯拉 3 月申報給監管單位的資料中顯示，已經擁有多個公司職稱的伊隆．馬斯克再新增「特斯拉電音王」（Technoking of Tesla）一職，財務長 Kirkhorn 也多了「貨幣大師」（Master of Coin）的頭銜。
回到主題，根據先前的監管資料，馬斯克 2019 年的總年薪是 23,760 美元，而 2018 時是 56,380 美元。
“However, he has never accepted his salary,” the company said.
What to expect from Tesla’s AI day event
It’s been nearly two years since Tesla’s first “Autonomy Day” event, at which CEO Elon Musk made numerous lofty predictions about the future of autonomous vehicles, including his infamous claim that the company would have “one million robotaxis on the road” by the end of 2020. And now it’s time for Part Deux.
This time, the event will be called “AI Day,” and according to Musk, the “sole goal” is to persuade experts in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to come work at Tesla. The company is known for its high rate of turnover, the latest being Jerome Guillen, a key executive who worked at Tesla for 10 years before recently stepping down. Attracting and retaining talent, especially top tier names, has proven to be a challenge for the company.
The August 19th event is scheduled to start at 5PM PT / 8PM ET
The August 19th event is scheduled to start at 5PM PT / 8PM ET at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. According to an invitation obtained by Electrek, it will feature “a keynote by Elon, hardware and software demos from Tesla engineers, test rides in Model S Plaid, and more.” Much like Battery Day, the event will be livestreamed on Tesla’s website, giving investors and the media, as well as the company’s many fans, an up-close look at what’s under development.
Musk and other top officials at the company are expected to provide updates on the rollout of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta version 9, which started reaching more customers this summer. We may also get details about Tesla’s “Dojo” supercomputer, the training of its neural network, and the production of its FSD computer chips. And there will also be “an inside look at what’s next for AI at Tesla beyond our vehicle fleet,” the invitation says.
Let’s start with what we know and work our way toward the speculation of what’s to come.
FSD rollout
The big news out of Tesla’s first Autonomy Day was the introduction of the company’s first computer chip, a 260 square millimeter piece of silicon that Musk described as “the best chip in the world.” Originally, Musk had claimed that Tesla’s cars wouldn’t need any hardware updates, only software, on the road to full autonomy. Turns out that wasn’t exactly the case; they would need this new chip — two of them, actually — in order to eventually drive themselves.
A lot has happened between the 2019 event and now. Last month, Tesla began shipping over-the-air software updates for FSD beta v9, its long-awaited, definitely not autonomous, but certainly advanced driver assist system. That means that Tesla owners who have purchased the FSD option (which now costs $10,000) would finally be able to use many of Autopilot’s advanced driver-assist features on local, non-highway streets, including Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, AutoPark, Summon, and Traffic Light and Stop Control.
The update doesn’t make Tesla’s cars fully autonomous
The update doesn’t make Tesla’s cars fully autonomous, nor will it launch “a million self-driving cars” on the road, as Musk predicted. Tesla owners who have Full Self-Driving still need to pay attention to the road and keep their hands on the steering wheel. Some don’t, which can have tragic consequences.
Loved by fans, loathed by safety advocates, the FSD software has gotten Tesla in a lot of hot water recently. In recently publicized emails between Tesla and California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the company’s director of Autopilot software made it clear that Musk’s comments (including his tweets) do not reflect the reality of what Tesla’s vehicles can actually do. And now Autopilot is under investigation by federal regulators who want to know why Teslas with Autopilot keep crashing into emergency vehicles.
Aside from the rollout of FSD beta v9, Tesla has also had to adjust to the global chip shortage. In a recent earnings call, Musk said that the company’s engineers had to rewrite some of their software in order to accommodate alternate computer chips. He also said that Tesla’s future growth will depend on a swift resolution to the global semiconductor shortage.
Tesla relies on chips to power everything from its airbags to the modules that control the vehicles’ seatbelts. It’s not clear whether the FSD chips, which are produced by Samsung, are being impacted by the shortage. Musk and his cohort may provide some insight into that during this week’s event.
Dojo
Outside the car, Tesla uses a powerful supercomputer to train the AI software that then gets fed to its customers via over-the-air software updates. In 2019, Musk teased this “super powerful training computer,” which he referred to as “Dojo.”
“Tesla is developing a [neural net] training computer called Dojo to process truly vast amounts of video data,” he later tweeted. “It’s a beast!”
He also hinted at Dojo’s computing power, claiming it was capable of an exaFLOP, or one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second. That is an incredible amount of power. “To match what a one exaFLOP computer system can do in just one second,” NetworkWorld wrote last year, “you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years.”
“It’s a beast!”
By way of comparison, chipmaker AMD and computer builder Cray are currently working with the US Department of Energy on the design of the world’s fastest supercomputer, with 1.5 exaFLOPs of processing power. Dubbed Frontier, AMD says the supercomputer will have as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined.
When completed, Dojo is expected to be among the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. But rather than performing advanced calculations in areas like nuclear and climate research, Tesla’s supercomputer is running a neural net for the purposes of training its AI software to power self-driving cars. Ultimately, Musk has said Tesla will make Dojo available to other companies that want to use it to train their neural networks.
Earlier this year, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI, gave a presentation at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, during which he offered more details about Dojo and its neural network.
“For us, computer vision is the bread and butter of what we do and what enables Autopilot,” Karpathy said, according to Electrek. “And for that to work really well, we need to master the data from the fleet, and train massive neural nets and experiment a lot. So we invested a lot into the compute.”
Other robots?
Earlier this month, Dennis Hong, founder of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA, tweeted a photo of a computer chip that many speculate is the in-house hardware used by Tesla’s Dojo.
But Hong is an interesting figure for other reasons, too. He specializes in humanoid robots and was a participant in the DARPA Urban Challenge which kicked off the race for self-driving cars. (His team placed third.)
Asked on Twitter whether his lab was working with Tesla, Hong posted some playful emojis but otherwise declined comment. We may learn more about how Hong’s work and Tesla’s pursuits intersect during AI Day.
Musk has been forthcoming about his desires for Tesla to become more than just a car company. “I think long term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company,” he said earlier this year.
The future
A warning for anyone tuning in to the AI Day livestream: take Musk’s predictions about near-term accomplishments with a massive grain of salt. The things that will be discussed during this event are unlikely to have any measurable impact on the company’s business in the months to come.
Self-driving cars are an incredibly difficult challenge. Even companies like Waymo that are perceived to have the best autonomous vehicle technology are still struggling to get it right. Tesla is no different.
“A key question for investors will be what the latest timeline is for achieving full autonomy,” Loup Funds managing partner Gene Munster said in a note. “Despite Elon’s ambitious goal of the end of this year, our best guess is that 2025 will be the first year of public availability of level 4 autonomy.”
The rest of 2021 is already jam packed for Tesla. The company needs to open factories in Texas and Germany. And it needs to tool up production for its hotly anticipated Cybertruck, which has been delayed until 2022. Full autonomy, such as it is, can wait.
Tesla A.I. Day: What to know and livestream info for Elon Musk’s huge event
Tesla’s vehicles are about to get a whole lot smarter.
On Thursday, the company plans to host an artificial intelligence event. Details are scarce, but the event will likely focus on its autonomous driving projects and A.I. training systems.
Tesla needs strong A.I. to power its most ambitious future features. Tesla has gradually improved its full self-driving beta software, with ambitions to drive from A to B without any human interventions. It will need software capable of making human-like driving decisions, hence the need for A.I.
All the company’s cars since October 2016 ship with a suite of sensors designed to eventually support the feature — all it needs, Tesla claims, is a computer and software update.
It comes at a difficult time for Tesla. Less than a week ago, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the company’s Autopilot semi-autonomous driving system. The feature promises to handle select driving areas with human oversight, and it’s meant to act as a stepping stone to the more ambitious point-to-point autonomous driving feature. The NHTSA will investigate 11 crashes where Autopilot was enabled.
Amid investigations and software boosts, Tesla will outline its A.I. capabilities. Here’s what to know.
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Steering wheel: soon to be a relic? Sjo/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images
Tesla A.I. Day: what is it?
In June, Musk first outlined the idea for an A.I. day:
“Looking at holding Tesla AI Day in about a month or so. Will go over progress with Tesla AI software & hardware, both training & inference. Purpose is recruiting.”
On July 29, CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla would host an A.I. Day on August 19.
The name resembles previous “days” organized by Tesla:
In April 2019, Tesla hosted an autonomy day. It explained that its new full self-driving computer chips could operate at 144 Tera operations per second, seven times better than the nearest competitor. This would be vital to making Teslas autonomous, as the computer needs to crunch through data at speed.
In September 2020, Tesla hosted a battery day. This outlined the company’s planned 4680 cells, which will introduce several improvements. Together, Tesla claims these will enable a 54 percent increase in battery range between charges and a 56 percent reduction in price per kilowatt-hour.
Tesla A.I. Day: what will we learn at the event?
Based on Musk’s previous comments, the event will likely outline the company’s progress on A.I. training systems and related hardware.
Musk announced in October 2016 that all vehicles would start shipping with the necessary sensors to support fully autonomous driving. He also proposed that Tesla would complete a cross-country autonomous drive in 2017.
Tesla missed that deadline, and by October 2018, Musk had to admit that it was “extremely difficult to achieve a general solution for self-driving that works well everywhere.”
Tesla first unveiled its neural network training system called “Dojo” in 2019. Musk explained in 2020 that the computer is designed to process “truly vast amounts of video data.”
In June 2021, head of A.I. Andrej Kaparthy gave a presentation at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition where he revealed more details. The supercomputer, TechCrunch reported, features 10 petabytes of “hot tier” storage and runs at 1.6 Terabytes per second.
Andrej Karpathy shares an image of Tesla’s in-house supercomputer. WAD at CVPR/YouTube
The system features 1.8 exaflops of processing power. “Flops” measure the amount of floating-point operations per second. TechTerms describe floating-point numbers as ones with a floating decimal place. The “exa” prefix refers to the number one followed by 18 zeroes. By comparison, the PlayStation 5 features 10.3 Teraflops of graphics processor power. The “Tera” prefix refers to the number one followed by 12 zeroes.
Kaparthy claimed that Tesla’s supercomputer could be the fifth most powerful in the world, but it hasn’t yet run the required benchmarks for official designation in the “TOP500” rankings.
“Dojo” is used to train up the A.I. with features like auto-labeling. This takes video captured from the company’s car cameras, recognizes objects, and labels them with attributes like acceleration and speed. Around 500 employees previously did this, CleanTechnica explains, but in April 2021, the company revealed that those employees are now checking the work done by the auto-labeling system.
The system, according to Kaparthy’s presentation, has so far labeled six billion objects from one million captured videos.
Tesla started rolling out a beta of its full self-driving software to participants in October 2020. Under supervision, the early versions of this software show the company’s progress.
But while Tesla is making the most of A.I., Musk has called for greater overall regulation. In November 2017, he called for legislators to regulate A.I. “like we do food, drugs, aircraft, and cars.” The fear, he explained a few months before that, is that super-smart intelligence could enslave humanity without proper oversight.
Tesla Model 3: full self-driving soon? ollo/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images
Tesla A.I. Day: how to watch
On Tuesday, Musk confirmed that Tesla would live stream the A.I. Day.
Start times and livestream details are unconfirmed. Previous events suggest that Tesla will stream the event via its YouTube channel.
Fans keen to find out more can receive notifications when Tesla adds a new video:
Visit the Tesla YouTube page.
Sign in to your Google account in the top right corner. You can make an account in the same place if you don’t already have one.
Once signed in, return to Tesla’s YouTube page and press the red “subscribe” button. This is free, despite the name.
Press the bell next to the “subscribed” button and press “all.” Depending on your settings, you will now receive notifications to your email inbox, computer, or smartphone.
And that’s it! If you miss the livestream, it should be available via the company’s YouTube channel to watch at a later date.