马斯克访谈实录：L5研发进展顺利，将在中国开展本土设计和本土研发

2020 年世界人工智能大会正在进行中，因为全球新冠肺炎疫情仍在肆虐，所以本届大会选择在线上进行。7 月 9 日，特斯拉 CEO 埃隆·马斯克通过视频连线的方式参与了大会分享，并对特斯拉自动驾驶在中国计划和上海工厂的情况进行了介绍。

马斯克在大会上表示，特斯拉自动驾驶在中国做得很好，目前正在中国建立相关的工程团队，而且正在招聘相应的工程师。

在此基础上，特斯拉会在中国做很多原创性的工程开发，不仅是简单把美国的东西搬到中国。

对于自动驾驶的未来发展，马斯克更是信心满满，他称特斯拉已经非常接近 L5 级自动驾驶，今年就可以实现 L5 级自动驾驶的基本功能。

在他看来，目前要实现 L5 级自动驾驶并不存在底层根本性的挑战，但是有很多的细节问题。

之后特斯拉就是要去解决这些细节问题，通过整合系统，持续解决长尾问题。

他讲到：「你会发现（现在的自动驾驶）可以处理大多数场景的情况，但是又会不时地出现一些奇怪的情况，你必须有一个系统来解决、训练，解决这些奇怪的场景。你需要现实的场景，没有什么比现实更复杂的。任何的模拟，都是现实世界复杂性的子集。」

针对数据训练，马斯克在对谈中还特意提到了特斯拉开发的 Dojo 训练系统，其目标是接收大量图像和视频数据，并在无人监督的情况下自行学习。这些图像和视频数据中有很多未定义的信息，比如出现在路上的行人、坑洞、小狗等障碍物。

马斯克称现在这个系统遇到的瓶颈是芯片的发热和运算速率，所以特斯拉也在开发新的总线和散热系统，辅助计算单元更高效地处理相应数据。

在特斯拉上海工厂方面，马斯克称其进展顺利，期待着尽快访问上海超级工厂，预计未来在中国工厂中会运用更多的人工智能和更智能化的软件，不过这个还需要花一些时间。

以下为埃隆·马斯克的发言实录（英文原版）：

Q=主持人；E=Elon Musk

Q：First, in terms of Tesla products, we know that Autopilot is one of its most popular features. How does it work in China?

首先，我们都知道，Autopilot 自动辅助驾驶是特斯拉纯电动车非常受欢迎的一项功能。它在中国市场的应用情况如何？

E：Tesla Autopilot does work reasonably well in China. It does not work quite as well in China as it does in the US because still most of our engineering is in the US so that tends to be the local group of optimization. So Autopilot tends to work the best in California because that is where the engineers are. And then once it works in California, we then extend it to the rest of the world. But we are building up our engineering team in China. And so if you’re interested in working at Tesla China as an engineer, we would love to have you work there. That will be great.

特斯拉自动辅助驾驶在中国市场应用还不错。但因为我们与自动驾驶相关的工程开发集中在美国，所以自动辅助驾驶功能在美国的应用的更好，在加州最好，这也主要是因为我们相关的工程师在加州。在我们确定这项功能在加利福尼亚运作良好后，我们会将其推送到世界其他地区。目前我们正在中国建立相关的工程团队。如果你想成为特斯拉中国的工程师，我们会非常欢迎，这将会非常好。

I really want to emphasize it is a lot that we are going to be doing original engineering in China. It’s not just converting sort of stuff from America to work in China, we will be doing original design and engineering in China. So please do consider Tesla China, if you’re thinking about working somewhere.

我想强调下，在中国我们要做的是进行很多原创性的工程开发。所以并不是简单的将美国的东西直接照搬到中国，而是就在中国进行原创的设计和原创的工程开发。所以，如果您考虑工作，请考虑在特斯拉中国工作。

Q：Great. How confident are you that level five autonomy will eventually be with us? And when do you think we will reach full level five autonomy?

您对于我们最终实现 L5 级别自动驾驶有多大信心？您觉得这一天什么时候会到来？

E：I’m extremely confident that level five or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think will happen very quickly.

我对未来实现 L5 级别自动驾驶或是完全自动驾驶非常有信心，而且我认为很快就会实现。

I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level five autonomy.I think I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year.

在特斯拉，我觉得我们已经非常接近 L5 级自动驾驶了。我有信心，我们将在今年完成开发 L5 级别的基本功能。

So yes, I think there are no fundamental challenges remaining for level five autonomy. There are many small problems. And then there’s the challenge of solving all those small problems and then putting the whole system together, and just keep addressing the long tail of problems. So you’ll find that you’re able to handle the vast majority of situations. But then there will be something very odd. And then you have to have the system figure out a train to deal with these very odd situations. This is why you need a kind of a real world situation. Nothing is more complex and weird than the real world. Any simulation we create is necessarily a subset of the complexity of the real world.

我认为实现自动驾驶 L5 目前不存在底层的根本性的挑战,但是有很多细节问题。我们面临的挑战就是要解决所有这些小问题，然后整合系统，持续解决这些长尾问题。你会发现你可以处理绝大多数场景的问题，但是又会不时出现一些奇怪不寻常的场景，所以你必须有一个系统来找出并解决这些奇怪不寻常场景的问题。这就是为什么你需要现实世界的场景。没有什么比现实世界更复杂了。我们创建的任何模拟都是现实世界复杂性的子集。

So we are really deeply enmeshed in dealing with the tiny details of level five autonomy. But I’m absolutely confident that this can be accomplished with the hardware that is in Tesla today, and simply by making software improvements, we can achieve level five autonomy.

因此，我们目前非常专注于处理 L5 级别自动驾驶的细节问题上。并且我相信这些问题完全可基于特斯拉车辆目前搭载的硬件版本来解决，我们只需改进软件，就可以实现 L5 级别自动驾驶。

Q：Great. If we look at the three building blocks of AI and robotics: perception, cognition, and action, how would you assess the progress respectively so far?

您觉得人工智能和机器人技术的三大支柱：感知、认知和行为，目前在各自领域的进展如何？

E：I am not sure I totally agree with dividing it into those categories: perception, cognition, and action. But if you do use those categories, I’d say that probably perception we’ve made, if you can say like the recognition of objects, we’ve made incredible progress in recognition of objects. In fact, I think it would probably fair to say that advanced image recognition system today is better than almost any human, even in an expert field.

我不确定人工智能技术是否可以这样分类。如果按照这个分类标准，在感知层面，以识别物体为例，目前的技术取得了巨大进展。 可以说，即便是在专业领域，当今的高级图像识别系统也比人类都要好。

So it is really a question of how much compute power, how many computers were required to train it? How many compute hours? What was the efficiency of the image training system? But in terms of image recognition or sound recognition, and really any signal you can say, generally speaking any byte stream, Can an AI system recognize things accurately with a given byte stream？ Extremely well.

问题的实质在于需要多强的计算能力，多少计算机和多长计算时间来训练感知能力？图像识别训练系统的效率如何？就图像识别或声音识别而言，对于给定的字节流,人工智能系统能否准确识别处理？ 答案是非常好。

Cognition. This is probably the weakest area. Do you understand concepts？Are you able to reason effectively? And can you be creative in a way that makes sense? You have so many advanced AIs that are very creative, but they do not curate their creative actions very well. We look at it and it is not quite right. It will become right though.

认知可能是最薄弱的领域，人工智能是否可以理解概念？是否会有效推理？能否创造有意义的事物？目前有很多非常有创造力的技术先进的人工智能，但是它们无法很好地控制其创造活动。至少现在在我们看来不太对，不过未来它会看起来像样些。

And then action, sort of like things like games, as maybe something part of the action part of thing. Obviously at this point, any game with rules, AI will be superhuman at any game with an understandable set of rules, essentially any game below a certain degree of freedom level. Let us say at this point, any game, it would be hard-pressed to think of a game where if there was enough attention paid to it, that we would not make it superhuman AI that could play it. That’s not even taking into account the faster reaction time of AI.

然后是行为。这个可以以游戏打比方。在任何规则明确的游戏中，或者自由发挥空间比较有限的游戏，人工智能就像超人类一样。就目前而言，很难想像有什么游戏，人工智能游戏玩家不能发挥超人类水平的，这甚至都不去考虑到人工智能更快的反应时间。

Q：In what ways does Autopilot stimulate the development of AI algorithms and chips? And how do you does it refresh our understanding of AI technology?

Autopilot 自动辅助驾驶在哪些方面推动了 AI 算法和芯片的发展？它又如何改变了我们对 AI 技术的理解？

E：In developing AI chips for Autopilot, what we found was that there was no system on the market that was capable of doing inference within a reasonable cost or power budget. So if we had gone with a conventional GPUs, CPUs and that kind of thing, we would have needed several hundred watts and we would have needed to fill up the trunk with computers and GPUs and a big cooling system. It would have been costly and bulky and have taken up too much power, which is important for range for an electric car.

在为自动辅助驾驶开发人工智能芯片时，我们发现市场上没有成本合理且低功耗的系统。如果我们使用传统的 GPU、CPU 或其他相似的产品，将耗费数百瓦的功率，并且后备箱会被计算机，GPU 巨大的冷却系统占据，由此一来成本高昂，占用车辆体积，而且高耗能。要知道能耗对于电动汽车的行驶里程很关键。

So we developed our own AI chip, the Tesla Full Self-Driving computer with dual system on chips with the eight bit and accelerators for doing the dot products. I think probably a lot of people in this audience are aware of it. But AI consists of doing a great many dot products. This is like, if you know what a dot product is, it’s just a lot of dot products, which effectively means that our brain must be doing a lot of dot products. We still actually haven’t fully explored the power of the Tesla Full Self-Driving computer. In fact, we only turned on the second system on chip harshly a few months ago. So making full use of Tesla Full-Self Driving computer will probably take us at least another year or so.

为此我们开发了特斯拉自有的人工智能芯片，即具有双系统的特斯拉完全自动驾驶电脑，该芯片具有 8 位元和加速器，用于点积运算。在座各位可能有很多人都有所了解，人工智能包含很多点积运算，如果你知道什么是点积运算，那么便知道点积运算量巨大，这意味着我们的电脑必须做很多点积运算。我们事实上还未完全发挥出特斯拉完全自动驾驶电脑的能力。实际上，几个月前我们才审慎地启动了芯片的第二套系统。充分利用特斯拉完全自动驾驶电脑的能力，可能还需要至少一年左右的时间。

Then we also have the Tesla Dojo system, which is a training system. And that’s intended to be able to process fast amounts of video data to improve the training for the AI system. The Dojo system, that’s like an fp16 training system and it is primarily constrained by heat and by communication between the chips. We are developing new buses and new sort of heat projection or cooling systems that enable a very high operation computer that will be able to process video data effectively.

我们还开发了特斯拉 Dojo 训练系统，旨在能够快速处理大量视频数据，以改善对人工智能系统的训练。Dojo 系统就像一个 FP16 训练系统，主要受芯片的发热量和通讯的速率的限制。所以我们也正在开发新的总线和散热冷却系统，用于开发更高效的计算机，从而能更有效处理视频数据。

How do we see the evolution of AI algorithms? I’m not sure how the best way to understand it, except that neural net seems to mostly do is to take a massive amount of information from reality, primarily passive optical, and create a vector space, essentially compress a massive amount of photons into a vector space. I am just thinking actually on the drive this morning, have you tried accessing the vector space in your mind? Like we normally take reality just granted in kind of analog way. But you can actually access the vector space in your mind and understand what your mind is doing to take in all the world data. What we actually doing is trying to remember the least amount of information possible.

我们是如何看待人工智能算法的发展呢？我不确定这是不是最好的理解方式，神经网络主要是从现实中获取大量信息，很多来自无源光学方面，并创建矢量空间，本质上将大量光子压缩为矢量空间。我今天早上开车的时候还在想，人们是否能够进入大脑中的矢量空间呢？我们通常以类比的方式，将现实视为理所当然。但我认为，其实你可以进入自己大脑中的矢量空间，并了解你的大脑是如何处理所有外部信息的。事实上它在做的是记忆尽可能少的信息。

So it’s taking a massive amount of information, filtering it down, and saying what is relevant. And then how do you create a vector space world that is a very tiny percentage of that original data? Based on that vector space representation, you make decisions. It is like a really compression and decompression that is just going on a massive scale, which is kind of how physics is like. You think of physics out physics algorithms as essentially compression algorithms for reality.

它获取并过滤大量信息，只保留相关的部分。那人们是如何在大脑中创建一个矢量空间呢？它的信息仅占原始数据很小一部分，却可以根据这个矢量空间的表达做决策。这实际上就类似一个大规模的压缩和解压缩的过程，有点像物理学，因为物理学公式本质上是对现实的压缩算法。

That is what physics does. Those physics formulas are compression algorithms for reality, which may sound very obvious. But if you simplify what it means, we are the proof points of this. If you simply ran a true physics simulation of the universe, it also takes a lot of compute. If you are given enough time, eventually you will have sentience. The proof of that is us. And if you believe in physics and the arches of the universe, it started out as sort of quarks electrons. And there was hydrogen for quite a while, and then helium and lithium. And then there were supernovas, the heavy elements formed billions of years later, some of those heavy elements learned to talk. We are essentially evolved hydrogen. If you just leave hydrogen out for a while, it turns into us. I think people don’t quite appreciate this. So if you say, where does the specialist come in? Where does sentience come in? The whole universe is sentience special or nothing is? Or you could say at what point from hydrogen to us did it become sentient?

这便是物理学的作用。很明显，物理公式是现实的压缩算法。简言之，我们人类就是物理学作用的证据。如果你对宇宙做一个真正物理学意义上的模拟，就需要大量的计算。如果有充足时间，最终会产生觉知。人类便是最佳证明。如果你相信物理学和宇宙的演化史，便知道宇宙一开始是夸克电子，很长一段时间是氢元素，然后出现了氦和锂元素，接着出现了超新星。重元素在数十亿年后形成，其中一些重元素学会了表达。那就是我们人类，本质上由氢元素进化而来。若将氢元素放一段时间，它就会慢慢转变为我们。我觉得大家可能不太赞成这一点。所以有人会问，specialist的作用是什么？觉知的作用又是什么？整个宇宙是一种特殊的觉知或者不存在特殊性？又或者，在氢元素转变为人类的过程中何时产生了知觉?

Q：Great. Our last question, congratulations on an incredible year so far at Tesla. How are things going at Gigafactory Shanghai? Is there any application of AI to manufacturing specifically at Giga Shanghai?

最后一个问题。祝贺特斯拉今年出色的业绩，我们也想知道，特斯拉上海超级工厂目前的进展怎么样？在上海超级工厂有没有一些制造业相关的 AI 应用？

E：Thank you. Things are going really well at Giga Shanghai. I’m incredibly proud of the Tesla team. They’re doing an amazing job. And I look forward to visiting Giga Shanghai as soon as possible. It’s really an impressive work that’s been done. I really can’t say enough good things. Thank you to the Tesla China team.

谢谢，特斯拉上海工厂进展顺利，我为特斯拉团队感到无比自豪，他们做得很棒！ 我期待能尽快访问上海超级工厂，他们出色地工作确实让我深感欣慰。我不知道该如何表达，真的非常感谢特斯拉中国团队。

We expect over time to use more AI and essentially smarter software in our factory. But I think it will take a while to really employ AI effectively in a factory situation. You can think of a factory as a complex, cybernetic collective involving humans and machines. This is actually how all companies are really.

预计未来我们的工厂中会运用更多的人工智能和更智能化的软件。但我认为在工厂，真正有效地使用人工智能还需要花费一些时间。你可以将工厂看作一个复杂的集合体，控制论集合体，其中涉及人也涉及机器。实际上所有公司都是如此。

Q：Thanks again you on for your time and joining us at this year’s world artificial intelligence conference. We hope to see you next year in person.

再次感谢您参加世界人工智能大会，也感谢您的精彩分享，我们期待着明年的大会能在现场见到您！

E：Thank you for having me in virtual form. I look forward to visiting physically next year, and I always enjoy visiting China. I am always amazed by how many smart, hardworking people that are in China and just that how much positive energy there is, and that people are really excited about the future. I want to make things happen. I cannot wait to be back.

谢谢您的线上采访。 我希望明年能有机会能亲自参加，我很喜欢到中国。 中国总是给我惊喜，中国有很多既聪明又勤奋的人，中国充满了正能量，中国人对未来满怀期待。我会让未来成为现实，所以我非常期待再次回来。