Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the company’s artificial intelligence advances during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
During the hour-long conference call, Musk said Tesla’s engineers have put the company ahead of competitors in the areas of AI and robotics.
“While others are pursuing different parts of the AI robotics stack, we’re pursuing it all,” Musk said. “This allows for better cost control, greater scale, faster time to market, and better products. This applies not only to autonomous vehicles, but also to autonomous humanoid robots.”
Musk also explained that his generative AI company, xAI, was founded because some AI experts preferred to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI) rather than Tesla-specific projects.
“I tried to get them to come to Tesla and I said, ‘You can work on AGI if you want,’ but they refused,” Musk said. “And only then did we create xAI.”
As a result, “Tesla is learning quite a lot from xAI,” he said.
“This is really helping advance full self-driving and building new Tesla data centers,” Musk said.
Musk tweeted on Tuesday that xAI’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee, has begun training AI models using 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, which he called “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world.”
“This is a huge advantage in training the world’s most powerful AI by any metric by December this year,” he added.
When asked during the earnings call about the possibility of Tesla investing in a sister company, Musk said it was a possibility.
“In terms of the investment, I think the next step will be shareholder approval, and I would certainly support that,” he said. “I think there will be an opportunity to integrate Grok into Tesla’s software.”
Grok is xAI’s first generative AI model, launched in November and is now available as a feature for paid users of X (aka Twitter).
Speaking about Tesla’s robotics efforts with its Optimus series of humanoid robots, Musk said Tesla has all the ingredients necessary to build a large-scale, practical, general-purpose humanoid robot. He cited an ARK Invest analysis that estimates the autonomous transportation market is around $5 trillion, and the general-purpose humanoid robot market could be even higher.
“The benign AI scenario we’re heading for is an age of abundance, where there’s no shortage of goods and services,” Musk said. “Everybody can get pretty much anything they want. The future we’re heading for is wild, very wild.”
He was tight-lipped about what Tesla will do next, but hinted that lower-cost vehicles are on the way.
“I won’t go into too much detail about our product roadmap because that will be discussed at our product launch event, but we do in fact plan to release a more affordable model in the first half of next year,” he said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Decryption.
