Tesla CEO Elon Musk is so bullish about the prospect of Tesla using custom hardware for artificial intelligence that he doubled down on his position at a recent company party for industry and academic researchers. Speaking to a crowd of smart industry heads, Musk even predicted that the specialized AI hardware the company is developing under the stewardship of Jim Keller will be the “best in the world.”

For those who don’t know, Jim Keller is a former AMD chip architect who is best known for being the lead architect on a number of computer chips that were developed during his time at AMD and Apple. He joined Tesla in 2016 to serve as the company’s vice president of hardware. That’s on top of his job as the lead guy in the company’s development of AI hardware. If anybody knows his way around this world, it’s Keller.

Musk’s confidence in his guys is clear by his boasts. He wasn’t shy about predicting the potential of his specialized hardware, which he says could be used inside future Tesla models to do the computing legwork needed to successfully advance autonomous driving technology. The company uses Nvidia graphics cards on its Autopilot hardware system, but it’s become clear that Tesla is looking to use its own custom chips to meet Musk’s goal of attaining level 5 autonomy by 2020.

Tesla’s aggressive pursuit in developing artificial intelligence isn’t new to the industry. Tech rivals like Google parent company Alphabet are developing their own versions of artificial intelligence. Google has its own that powers its cloud AI services while Apple and Huawei have added them to their smartphones.

The potential advancements brought by artificial intelligence is still in its embryonic stage. It’s too early to tell what the short and long-term effects are going to be to us as a society. But rest assured, we’re all going to look back to these last few years as the era when we started scratching the surface of artificial intelligence.

References

Read more about Elon Musk.

Read more Tesla news.