Tesla is not just a car maker but an AI robotics firm: Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk feels that his company is not just an electric-car maker but in the long-term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics firm.

Musk said during the company's Q1 2021 earnings call on Monday that Tesla is developing one of the strongest hardware and software AI teams in the world.

"We appear to be able to do things with self-driving that others cannot. So and if you look at the evolution of what technologies we have developed, we developed them in order to solve the problem of self-driving," he told the analysts.

"The software out there was really quite primitive for this task and so we built a team from scratch and have been developing what we think is probably the most advanced real-world AI in the world," he added.

Tesla reported $10.3 billion in sales and net income of $438 million in the first quarter of 2021, a growth of 74 per cent from a the year-ago period.

Musk said that currently, they use Tesla training software.

"We drew up a lot of training software, a lot of labelling software to do -- be able to do surround video labelling, which is quite tricky. This means all eight cameras simultaneously at 36 frames per second per camera labelling video over time. It wasn't any tool that existed for this. So we developed our own labelling tool," he explained.