Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.

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The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.

To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.
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Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.

These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).
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There's an interesting detail in one of the frames: glimpse of a facility worker observing an industrial robot moving a rack.
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What is interesting is that:

✅ Cell production facilities are Class 7 clean rooms, while the worker doesn't wear the usual "bunny suit" protective gear.
✅ There's a barrier between the worker and the robot: likely separating clean-room air from unprotected air.
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This suggests that much - maybe all - of the Kato Road production floor is in an isolated high grade clean-room with no human presence. Even finished cells are handled in what appear to be a clean-room environment.

Only maintenance would require humans to enter this space.
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The internal unit of handling finished cells appears to be a group of "4" cells in a single holder. A rack would have 16 of these.
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This large "wall" of Tesla labeled units appears to be high volume storage for 64-cell racks - possibly QA testing and initial formation (charging) of the cell.

Cell formation is usually done by third party equipment - but Tesla clearly uses their own equipment now.
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At 0:20 there appears to be rare footage of the "jelly roll" (inner roll of the cell) being carefully pressed into the "can", creating much of the final cell body.
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At 0:26 I think we see how the top of the cells get pressed to the bottom of the cell.

The famous "tab-less" picture on the right was disclosed on Battery Day. I believe Tesla is pressing the continuous metal surface of electrodes to the can surface, creating good contact.
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Tesla's goal with releasing this video was clearly recruitment - as can be seen in the final frames of the video. 🙂
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𝐓𝐋;𝐃𝐖: this video IMO demonstrates that Tesla's Kato Road facility is a full scale cell production pilot line & factory that is far more ahead in commercializing & scaling their new cell technologies than the "R&D project" impression @elonmusk gave on Battery Day. 😉

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THREAD: How is it possible to train a well-performing, advanced Computer Vision model 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗣𝗨? 🤔

At the heart of this lies the most important technique in modern deep learning - transfer learning.

Let's analyze how it


2/ For starters, let's look at what a neural network (NN for short) does.

An NN is like a stack of pancakes, with computation flowing up when we make predictions.

How does it all work?


3/ We show an image to our model.

An image is a collection of pixels. Each pixel is just a bunch of numbers describing its color.

Here is what it might look like for a black and white image


4/ The picture goes into the layer at the bottom.

Each layer performs computation on the image, transforming it and passing it upwards.


5/ By the time the image reaches the uppermost layer, it has been transformed to the point that it now consists of two numbers only.

The outputs of a layer are called activations, and the outputs of the last layer have a special meaning... they are the predictions!

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