Tesla just bought an AI startup to improve Autopilot—here’s what it does

Enlarge / DeepScale CEO Forrest Iandola, shown here in a 2013 photo, is Tesla’s latest machine learning guru. (credit: D Coetzee)

Tesla has acquired the machine learning startup DeepScale, CNBC, Techcrunch, and other news outlets have reported. The company’s CEO, Forrest Iandola, announced Monday that he had joined Tesla’s Autopilot team.

Iandola explained his company’s mission to Ars during a phone call last year, just after the company raised $15 million from venture capitalists in April 2018. DeepScale was building image recognition software based on convolutional neural networks.

A key step for any self-driving software system is perception: identifying cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and other objects around the car. Identifying objects accurately is crucial because it allows software to make informed predictions about where they might move in the future. Most companies working on the problem use a technique called “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) to tackle this problem. You can check out our deep dive on CNNs for full details on how they work.