Here’s a summary of history (there are others upthread).
Way back in the beginning Waymo abandoned the myth of lots of real miles. They started building TPUs for inference way back in 2015. The newbies convinced themselves this is a real mileage myth. What is real? Waymo CONVERGED to safe and insurable (and TRULY AUTONOMOUS) in Phoenix at under 10M miles. They’ll be live in 20 cities before 250M miles. Now tell me again how much 15B means? Here’s my hint for where to look…15B is 60x of 250M. The reality is obvious. Tesla’s main jester is only talking about making his own chips and inventing inference. This is beyond ignorant as Alphabet TPUs are on version 7. Hooray for Tesla, they finally got the message about how synthetic is the path to the long tail. Of course the jester can’t help himself and remains enamored with the new word inference he seems to have stuck in his head next to hyper-exponential and order of magnitude.