Nvidia just announced the Tesla P40 and P4 cards for Neural network inferencing applications. A review is at http://www.anandtech.com/show/10675/nvidia-announces-tesla-p40-tesla-p4. Comparing it to the Tesla P100 released earlier this year, the P40 is targeted to inferencing applications. Whereas the P100 was targeted to more demanding training phase of neural networks. P4o comes with the TensorRT (real time) library for fast inferencing (e.g. real time detection of objects).

Some of the best solutions of hard problems in machine learning come from neural networks, whether in computer vision, voice recognition, games such as Go and other domains. Nvidia and other hardware kits are accelerating AI applications with these releases.

What happens if the neural network draws a bad inference, in a critical AI application ? Bad inferences have been discussed in the literature, for example in the paper: Intriguing properties of neural networks.

There are ways to minimize bad inferences in the training phase, but not foolproof – in fact the paper above mentions that bad inferences are low probabalility yet dense.

Level 5 autonomous driving is where the vehicle can handle unknown terrain. Most current systems are targeting Level 2 or 3 autonomy. The Tesla Model S’ Autopilot is Level 2.

An answer is to pair it with a regular program that checks for certain safety constraints. This would make it safer, but this alone is likely insufficient either for achieving Level 5 operations, or for providing safely for them.