“The bottleneck is software. It's the neural nets. They're not capable of being reliable enough to operate without supervision beyond small geofenced areas that are limited in speed. And I have no indication right now that the computing power or the memory bandwidth is the limiting factor.”
Electrek · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
A viewer asked whether Tesla's next in-car chip would improve Cybercab performance. Lambert said a better chip is not the issue and that the software is what holds back autonomy.
Transcript
cartels. The cartels. That thing. Give me a Wagoner. It's basically a tank.
Yeah, put a mountain gun on there. Question: Do you think the upcoming A16 chip from Tesla will improve the performance of the cyber cab?
First of all, here in natural, you're talking about the SI6 chip, not the AI chip. AI is not a word we use anymore. Maybe now that W Waves arrive, maybe Elon is going to revert back. It would be crazy because he changed SpaceX AI to SpaceX SI. It would be crazy that he lasted two weeks and then he changed back. But we'll improve the performance of the CyberCab. Well, first of all, we have the AI5 chip that's coming before that. So I don't know why you're already skipping to the I6. I guess that might be because Elon did say that AI5 is mainly for Optimus. I think that's what he said. But if it's ready in volume production, I don't know why it wouldn't also make it to the cars. But to me, it's still pretty clear that the bottleneck is software, is the software, it's the AI, is the neural nets. They're not capable of being reliable enough to operate without supervision beyond small geofense area that are limited in speed. And I have no indication right now that the computing power or the memory bandwidth is the limiting factor at this point. That probably might change in…
All right. In Metro Detroit, I see Jeep Recon EVs rolling around and they will go on sale. But when? That's interesting. That's basically an SUV without doors, right? Or the doors come off. It's always hilarious. It's like the doors come off. That's great. Question, a bit of advice. Do you guys…
In the last software update, I did see some indication that they are working on it. So you might actually get it. But yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I don't see that much use of Grok inside the vehicle. All the commands that it does inside the vehicle, you can do pretty well with the regular…
Yeah, but is that done actually locally on the computer? Or is it, you know, that whole thing is sent to the web? I don't know which of the. I'm
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