Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the advances in artificial intelligence the automotive company is making during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
During the hour-long call, Musk said Tesla engineers have put the company ahead of its competition in AI and robotics.
“While others are pursuing different parts of the AI robotic stack, we are pursuing all of them,” Musk said. “This allows for better cost control, more scale, quicker time to market, and a superior product—applying not just to autonomous vehicles but to autonomous humanoid robots.”
Musk also explained that xAI, his generative AI company, was founded because some AI experts preferred to work on general artificial intelligence (AGI) rather than on Tesla-specific projects.
“I tried to recruit them to Tesla, including to say, ‘You can work on AGI if you want,’ and they refused,” Musk said. “Only then was xAI created.”
As a result, he said, “Tesla is learning quite a bit from xAI.”
“It's been actually helpful in advancing full self-driving and in building up the new Tesla data center,” Musk said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Musk tweeted that xAI's data center in Memphis, Tenn., had started AI model training using 100,000 GPUs from Nvidia. He called it “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world.”
Nice work by @xAI team, @X team, @Nvidia & supporting companies getting Memphis Supercluster training started at ~4:20am local time.
With 100k liquid-cooled H100s on a single RDMA fabric, it’s the most powerful AI training cluster in the world!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
“This is a significant advantage in training the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year,” he added.
When asked during the earnings call if Tesla might invest in its sister company, Musk said it was a possibility.
“Regarding investing, next I think we'd need to have a shareholder approval of any such investment—I'm certainly supportive of that,” he said. “I think that there are opportunities to integrate Grok into Tesla software.”
Grok is xAI's first generative AI model, released in November, and currently available as a feature for paid users of X (aka Twitter).
Turning to Tesla’s work in robotics with its Optimus line of humanoid robots, Musk said Tesla has all the necessary components to create large-scale, high-utility, generalized humanoid robots. Musk cited an ARK Invest analysis that estimated a market cap of approximately $5 trillion for autonomous transportation—and even higher for general-purpose humanoid robots.
“The benign AI scenario we are headed for is an age of abundance where there is no shortage of goods and services,” Musk said. “Anyone can have pretty much anything they want. It's a wild, very wild future we're headed for.”
He was tight-lipped about what was coming from Tesla, but did suggest a lower-priced vehicle was on the horizon.
“We won't get too much into the product roadmap here because that is reserved for product announcement events, but we are, in fact, to deliver a more affordable model in the first half of next year,” he said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.