Tesla AI Day Reflections

As an engineer building platforms myself, this was a pretty fascinating tech talk that really caught my attention.

Seeing how they’re doing everything in-house - from semiconductor design to manufacturing processes, plus the matching compilers, development environment, and software stack - makes engineers like me who can only observe this innovation from the outside incredibly curious.

Most of the questions during the Q&A session were about exactly these areas.

For people who’ve gotten tired of simply using frameworks and applying new modeling on top to find more efficient AI models, this kind of next-generation platform approach is what they’re craving. While ML hasn’t been booming for that long, the fact that simply advancing at the high-level software stack isn’t sustainable became clear with GPT-3.

This tech talk clearly showed that companies like Intel, Tesla, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are changing the world not simply because they have platforms, but because they have the capability to attract the researchers and engineers who can build next-generation platforms.

And these next-generation platforms become the foundation for all software and business worldwide, and we can’t escape from that ecosystem… 😅

Since these engineers now operate within the unstoppable flow of open source, if you don’t show new vision and new architecture, you’ll quickly lose out to competitors. (Actually, this seems to make the open source movement even stronger.)

It’s always a sad reality that Korea doesn’t have many people who can see and present such incredible visions.

The Evolution of Human Thinking

The cultural evolution from logical thinking to computational thinking that brought huge progress to humanity is now advancing to AI-based thinking, and what drives this is computational thinking.

I really hope Korea has more people who contribute to making the world better based on computational and AI-based thinking.

What This Means for Platform Engineers

As someone working on platform development, Tesla AI Day made me think about several key points:

1. Vertical Integration is the Future

Tesla isn’t just building AI models - they’re building the entire stack from silicon to software. This kind of vertical integration allows for optimizations that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

2. Hardware-Software Co-design Matters

The way they designed their D1 chip specifically for their neural network workloads shows how important it is to design hardware and software together, not separately.

3. Scale Changes Everything

When you’re processing exabytes of data from millions of vehicles, traditional approaches simply don’t work. You need to rethink everything from the ground up.

The Korean Tech Landscape

It’s somewhat disappointing that Korea doesn’t have more companies taking these kinds of bold, visionary approaches. We have incredible engineering talent, but we often seem to be following rather than leading in these next-generation platform innovations.

Maybe it’s because of:

• Risk-averse corporate culture
• Emphasis on incremental improvements over breakthrough innovation
• Lack of patient capital for long-term R&D investments
• Brain drain to Silicon Valley companies

What We Can Learn

For engineers working in Korea (or anywhere outside Silicon Valley), Tesla AI Day offers some lessons:

1. Think in Systems: Don’t just optimize one component - think about the entire system
2. Question Assumptions: Just because everyone uses a certain approach doesn’t mean it’s optimal
3. Invest in Fundamentals: Hardware, compilers, and low-level optimizations matter more than ever
4. Open Source Everything: The best way to build platforms is to make them accessible to everyone

Looking Forward

The shift from computational thinking to AI-based thinking is happening whether we’re ready or not. The question is: will we be building the platforms that enable this shift, or will we just be using platforms built by others?

I hope more Korean engineers and companies start thinking about these fundamental platform challenges. We have the talent - we just need the vision and the courage to pursue it.

The future belongs to those who can see it coming and build the infrastructure to make it happen! 🚀