“We’ll take autonomous cars for granted in a very short period of time,” Elon says.

JHH asks about government policies, saying he’d love to work on email while driving to work, quickly adding that he’d like to do so without breaking the law. What does the government need to do?

Elon notes that it will be several years after self-driving becomes possible that government will allow it. They want a car to be not as safe as a person driving but significantly safer.

“When it comes to public safety, there’s an argument for being quite cautious before there’s a change. I don’t think it’s the case right now that there’s a full autonomous system that regulators aren’t approving. But there could be next year.”

“I don’t think it’s the case right now that there’s a full autonomous system that regulators aren’t approving,” Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. “But there could be next year.”

Elon adds that the first thing we try to do is establish a hardware platform so we can do continuous updates to the software. A lot of that will happen later this year. I have an announcement on Thursday, and I don’t want to get ahead of that.

?He deflects Jen-Hsun’s kidding effort to ask if he want to share that news, “There’s going to be a call on Thursday on what’s going to be in our next version for anyone that’s interested, that’s all”

Eoin Treacy's view

Anyone who has ever played a pc game will be familiar with the positive difference an Nvidia graphics card can have on the experience. As the company’s CEO goes on to explain in the above webcast they now do a lot more than that. This section from an Nvidia blog highlights the importance of GPU processors in speeding up computations as well as highlighting their origin in gaming: 

The GPU’s advanced capabilities were originally used primarily for 3D game rendering. But now those capabilities are being harnessed more broadly to accelerate computational workloads in areas such as financial modeling, cutting-edge scientific research and oil and gas exploration.

?In a recent BusinessWeek article, Insight64 principal analyst Nathan Brookwood described the unique capabilities of the GPU this way: “GPUs are optimized for taking huge batches of data and performing the same operation over and over very quickly, unlike PC microprocessors, which tend to skip all over the place.”

Architecturally, the CPU is composed of only few cores with lots of cache memory that can handle a few software threads at a time. In contrast, a GPU is composed of hundreds of cores that can handle thousands of threads simultaneously. The ability of a GPU with 100+ cores to process thousands of threads can accelerate some software by 100x over a CPU alone. What’s more, the GPU achieves this acceleration while being more power-and cost-efficient than a CPU.

When we think about the challenge of developing autonomous vehicles, one of the primary goals is to process graphic data instantaneously. The increasing ubiquity of super computers is enabling the evolution of this sector. It’s still a long way off, not least because of technical difficulties and the burden of proof required before regulators can permit these vehicles but the trend is clear. 

Nvidia has held a progression of higher reaction lows since 2012 

Tesla is now trading below the 200-day MA and will need to sustain a move back above it to demonstrate a return to demand dominance beyond the short term.