Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels
EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze – use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels.
The Elon Musk-led outfit said in its recent earnings conference call for calendar Q1 that it had noticed its vehicles spend a considerable amount of their time just sitting there not moving. Many pack in a decent amount of processing power, so why not get them to do something useful and earn some cash for the company as well?
Speaking on the conference call, Musk said that he thought most Teslas were probably used for about a third of the hours in a week.
"But then there's certainly going to be some hours left for charging and cleaning and maintenance in that world, you can do a lot of other workloads," added Tesla's Director of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy.
He claimed that AI companies have batch workloads where they send "a bunch of documents" that are run through large neural networks and "take a lot of compute to chunk through."
