'Without him, we would just be another car firm': Musk lauds Ashok Ellusamy; read to know more about the CEG alumnus

NEW DELHI: Lauding the Indian-origin engineer Ashok Elluswamy, who was the first recruit of Tesla's Autopilot team, Elon Musk on Sunday expressed gratitude towards him, saying that "without him and our awesome team, we would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that does not exist".

This comes after Elluswamy, in his detailed note on X, said that Musk has been the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla. "He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time," it added.

Later, the tech billionaire quoted Elluswamy's post on X and wrote, "Thanks Ashok! Ashok was the first person to join the Tesla AI/Autopilot team and ultimately rose to lead all AI/Autopilot software". "Btw, I never suggested that he say anything and I had no idea he wrote this until I saw it 10 minutes ago," he added.

Ellusamy is the director of the Autopilot Software team at Tesla. In his note, wrote: "If not for Elon's ambition, Tesla might have dwindled to become just another car company. In the future, fully autonomous cars and useful household robots will be common place and the world will think that this was how it was always supposed to be. Until then, we need Elon Musk to push the frontier, because he sees it already."

He recalled how back in 2014, "Autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer that only had about 384 KB of memory and puny compute (didn't even have native floating point arithmetic). He (Musk) asked the engineering team to implement lane keeping, lane changing, longitudinal control for vehicles, curvature, etc.

Many, even in the team, thought that the request was crazy. Nonetheless, he never gave up and pushed the team to achieve this very difficult goal. In 2015, beyond all odds, Tesla shipped the world's first Autopilot system. The second closest such product only came to market many years later," Ellusamy added.

Tesla Autopilot is an advanced driver-assistance system that amounts to partial vehicle automation, aimed at reducing overall workloads of drivers.

Who is Ashok Ellusamy?

Ashok Elluswamy is a robotics engineer with experience in computer vision and perception through planning and control. He has been associated with Tesla's Autopilot team for over eight years in various capacities including as Senior Staff Software Engineer.

Elluswamy was the first employee to be hired for Tesla's Autopilot team, with Musk actually using Twitter to ask people to apply for the role. In 2022, Musk said that he had tweeted about Tesla going to launch an auto pilot team. "Through that tweet, Ashok was the first to be selected in the auto pilot team," Musk had said. 

Prior to joining Tesla, Elluswamy was associated with Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab and WABCO Vehicle Control Systems.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai and a Master’s degree in Robotics System Development from Carnegie Mellon University. As per a LinkedIn endorsement from Elluswamy's professor at CMU, John Dalon, he was one of the top students and showed initiative in learning a wide variety of topics.

READ ELLUSAMY'S FULL POST HERE

(With IANS inputs)