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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, 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.

Elluswamy, in his note, shared an instance that goes back to 2014, when "autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer".

"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 asked the engineering team to implement lane keeping, lane changing, longitudinal control for vehicles, curvature, etc," the engineer wrote.

"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," he added.