Of course, because NNs are hot with investors now and Tesla wants their money.

Companies frequently misrepresent how their technology works to the public. Typically they'll do some small portion with the hot technology for buzzword compliance, and then build the rest of it with an actually sensible, boring, and tailored-to-the-problem technology stack, oftentimes with a lot of proprietary legwork done by their data scientists and engineers. This way they get the best of all worlds: investment dollars from gullible investors, PR from journalists that want to hop on the next big thing, a product that actually works, and misdirection so competitors hop on approaches that aren't going to work anyway.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with Tesla. Their custom chip is almost entirely focused on being a neural network accelerator and they seem to be hugely reliant on neural networks. Notably Waymo is said to be less reliant on neural networks but Tesla definitely depends on them.

That doesn't really prove much. The classification is the heavy part that needs acceleration. The algorithmic side would probably not need an accelerator, as it's basically a decision tree.

My original point was that the decision tree should hopefully degrade gracefully as the prediction quality goes down, and not have any brand that leads to an insane behavior.

Now obviously, the better your predictions, the better the driving will be, which is why you'd want NN accelerators.

Gives me the impression that Tesla made a small innovation which they're trying to overblow to investors since buzzwords like machine learning are more interesting than actual progress. I'm not saying Tesla isn't making massive progress but that anything they say to the press should be taken with a grain of salt.

Why speculate? Watch the I vestor day video and see for yourself why it's not just hot air.