Tesla owner and xAI founder Elon Musk has denied recent reports that Tesla will be paying his AI startup xAI to share AI technologies. “The clarity comes after the Wall Street Journal reported on “discussions” between the two companies, citing unnamed people allegedly knowledgeable about the issue, and asserted them would make revenues from the carmaker.”.
Musk has now taken to an X post to address those rumors, saying:
“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.”
Unsupervised Full Self-Driving
Musk elaborated further on Tesla’s progress with its Full Self-Driving capabilities, pointing out that while Tesla has learned from its collaboration with xAI engineers, there is no formal licensing agreement between them. Musk said:
“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 them.”
He elaborated further by stating that Tesla’s AI models run effectively on a 300W computer and process massive amounts of real-world video data to make decisions while driving. Unlike LLMs, Tesla’s system processes several gigabytes of data per second, with its context size being far beyond the usual LLM.
xAI Gains Momentum in the AI Ecosystem
Musk founded xAI in July this year with the goal of positioning it as a competitor against OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. Although a new entrant in the field, Musk believes that xAI could give tough competition in the AI space by late 2024.
Recently, Musk unveiled Colossus, them powerful training system built with the help of Nvidia. Currently, running on 100,000 H100 GPUs, Musk says the cluster should double in size in the upcoming months, giving more powers to xAI.
Trump’s Offer for Musk Serving America
In one of those surreal political twists, former US president Donald Trump recently said that if he is re-elected in the presidential election of 2024, he will create a government efficiency commission to be headed by Musk. And Musk has assured him that when the call came to serve, Musk would heed the call-no pay, title, or credit, of course.
On the campaign trail, he promised that he will make America an innovator leader and a leader in the most exciting industries of the future, which means digital assets and cryptocurrencies.
