Monday, September 9, 2024

The Modest Mr. Musk (TSLA; xAI)

From TechCrunch, September 8:

Elon Musk says Tesla has ‘no need’ to license xAI models

Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models.

The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known as Full Self-Driving or FSD). The AI startup would also help develop features such as a voice assistant in Tesla vehicles and software for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus.

Writing on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk said he hadn’t read the WSJ story, but he described a post summarizing the report as “not accurate.”

“Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI that have helped accelerate achieving unsupervised FSD, but there is no need to license anything from xAI,” he wrote. “The xAI models are gigantic, containing, in compressed form, most of human knowledge, and couldn’t possibly run on the Tesla vehicle inference computer, nor would we want them to.”....

....MUCH MORE