The founder of Tesla and SpaceX has been one of the most vocal prominent figures in expressing concerns about AI – going as far as to call it humanity’s “biggest existential threat” if left unchecked.

Of course, given the nature of the companies Musk has founded, he is also well aware of AI’s potential.

Back in 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI – an organisation founded with the aim of pursuing and promoting ethical AI development. Musk ended up leaving OpenAI in February last year over disagreements with the company’s work.

Earlier this week, Musk said that OpenAI should be more transparent and specifically said his confidence is “not high” in former Google engineer Dario Amodei when it comes to safety.

Responding to a piece by MIT Technology Review about OpenAI, Musk tweeted: “All orgs developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla.”

In response to a further question of whether such regulations should be via individual governments or global institutions like the UN, Musk said he believes both.

Musk’s tweet generated some feedback from other prominent industry figures, including legendary Id Software founder John Carmack who recently stepped back from video game development to focus on independent AI research.

Carmack asked Musk: “How would you imagine that working for someone like me? Cloud vendors refuse to spawn larger clusters without a government approval? I would not be supportive.”

Coder Pranay Pathole shared a similar scepticism to Musk’s call as Carmack, saying: “Large companies ask for regulations acting all virtuous. What they are really doing is creating barriers for entry for new competition because only they can afford to comply with the new regulations.”

The debate over the extent of AI regulations and how they should be implemented will likely go on for some time – we can only hope to get them right before a disaster occurs. If you want to help Musk in building AI, he’s hosting a “super fun” hackathon at his place.

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In a tweet, Musk wrote: “Tesla will hold a super fun AI party/hackathon at my house with the Tesla AI/autopilot team in about four weeks. Invitations going out soon.”

The hackathon will focus on the AI behind Tesla’s problematic AutoPilot feature which has been reported to accelerate erratically. Tesla has denied the claims but the hackathon suggests the company at least wants to make AutoPilot more robust.

Ahead of the hackathon announcement, Musk called for developers to join Tesla’s AI team which, he says, reports directly to him.

Talking up the opportunity, Musk highlighted that Tesla will soon have over a million connected vehicles worldwide. Every Tesla is fitted with the sensors and computing power needed for full self-driving which “is orders of magnitude more than everyone else combined”.

Musk says that an individual’s educational background is irrelevant. However, before you get too excited you can just waltz into Tesla, you will be required to pass a “hardcore coding test”.

Python is used “for rapid iteration” at Tesla to build neural networks before the code is converted into “C++/C/raw metal driver code” for the speed required for such critical tasks as piloting a vehicle.

As part of that need for speed, Tesla is also taking on the challenge of building its own AI chips. Musk says Tesla is seeking world-class chip designers to join the company’s teams based in Palo Alto and Austin.

Musk has been vocal about his fears of AI – calling it a potentially existential threat if left unchecked. However, he is also well aware of its opportunities (if that’s of any surprise given how it’s helping to inflate his and investors’ wallets).

“My actions, not just words, show how critically I view (benign) AI,” Musk wrote.

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Tesla currently uses Nvidia’s silicon for its vehicles. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, said earlier this month that he’s a “big fan” of Nvidia but that an in-house AI chip would be able to outperform those of the leading processor manufacturer.

During a conference call on Thursday, Huang said its customers are “super excited” about  Nvidia’s Xavier technology for autonomous machines. He also notes that it’s currently in production, whereas Tesla’s rival is yet-to-be-seen.

Here’s what Huang had to say during the call:

“With respect to the next generation, it is the case that when we first started working on autonomous vehicles, they needed our help. We used the 3-year-old Pascal GPU for the current generation of Autopilot computers.

It’s very clear now that in order to have a safe Autopilot system, we need a lot more computing horsepower. In order to have safe computing, in order to have safe driving, the algorithms have to be rich. It has to be able to handle corner conditions in a lot of diverse situations.

Every time there are more and more corner conditions or more subtle things that you have to do, or you have to drive more smoothly or be able to take turns more quickly, all of those requirements require greater computing capability. And that’s exactly the reason why we built Xavier. Xavier is in production now. We’re seeing great success and customers are super excited about Xavier.

That’s exactly the reason why we built it. It’s super hard to build Xavier and all the software stack on top of it. If it doesn’t turn out for whatever reason for them [Tesla] you can give me a call and I’d be more than happy to help.”

The conference call was carried out following the release of Nvidia’s fiscal earnings report where the company reported better-than-expected earnings.

“Growth across every platform – AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization, self-driving cars – drove another great quarter,” said Huang. “Fueling our growth is the widening gap between demand for computing across every industry and the limits reached by traditional computing.”

However, due to lower-than-expected revenue guidance, Nvidia stock fell by six percent on Thursday following the earnings report.

What are your thoughts on Huang’s comments? Let us know below.

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Tesla is a pioneering and forward-looking company and, as our readers know well, AI is the future of just about everything. It would have been a safe bet Tesla intends to be at the forefront.

During a Tesla-hosted party at the NIPS intelligence conference in Long Beach, which has been called ‘draft day’ for how AI companies use it to recruit talent, Musk told attendees: “I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts. We are developing custom AI hardware chips.”

No further details were provided about the company’s plans but Musk gave a shout out to Jim Keller, Vice President of Autopilot Hardware & Software Engineering at Tesla, for developing “AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world.”

However, Musk isn’t exactly a full supporter of AI. On multiple occassions he’s voiced his concerns about AI posing an apocalyptic-level threat to mankind if it’s not properly regulated.

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful,” said Musk. “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.”

Musk even recently described his investments in AI research as “keeping an eye on what’s going on”, rather than viable return on capital.

The only thing less surprising than Tesla building AI is Musk’s optimism for driverless cars. While Tesla also manufactures things such as home batteries and even solar panels, the company’s main focus is cars.

Tesla’s vehicles pioneered many semi-autonomous features and have the capabilities to become fully driverless later on after the regulatory and insurance pieces come into place for each country.

At the party, Musk said he believes “half of new cars built ten years from now will be autonomous” and that general artificial intelligence will arrive in around seven or eight years.

What are your thoughts on Tesla building AI chips?

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