You know: microchips are getting smaller and faster. Their computing power is growing at an exponential rate, a trend born in the early days of computing: at the time, chips filled entire rooms and required a lot of energy to function. Today, those same chips can fit in a smartphone, consume very little and be increasingly powerful. How much?
A new study commissioned by Vanarama (you can find it here) says Tesla cars will be smarter than humans by 2033. Boom. Am I laughing? We see. The company performed an analysis of the computing power of Tesla microchips to predict how many years it will take them to match that of a human brain.
The results at a glance
- Tesla's microchips will surpass the computing power of a human brain (one quadrillion operations per second) in just 11 years (10,94), by 2033.
- The computing power of Tesla's microchip is increasing at a rate of 486% per year.
- Tesla's “AI brain” will therefore take 17 years to reach maturity, eight years less than it does for us (the human brain reaches maturity at 25).
- Tesla's D1 chip is 30 times more powerful than the chip used just six years ago.
Tesla D1 chip 3 times more powerful than a chip used 6 years ago
Tesla's D1 chip was presented last year: this year its new version will be released (on the occasion we should also see the long-awaited Tesla Bot called Optimus).
The growth in computing power has been enormous: 362 trillion operations per second, compared to 144 trillion for Hardwar 3 (in 2019). Before him, Hardware 2 with 72 trillion operations in 2016, and before that, 12 trillion operations.
Computing power, will we really see cars (and other machines) more "intelligent" than us?
“It's not crazy to believe that,” concludes the study. “Technology is likely to become significantly smarter than humans in our lifetime. Microchips are already capable of today function more or less like brain synapses".
Who knows, at that point maybe they will make the horns in our place when someone overtakes them.
