Tesla's AI and Robotics Leadership

Elon Musk addressed Tesla stakeholders during a Q2 2024 earnings reporting session. During the session, he highlighted the electric vehicle manufacturer's "remarkable advances" in artificial intelligence and robotics.

For a full hour, Musk shared insights into how Tesla's engineers push the company ahead of its competition.

"While others are pursuing different parts of the AI robotic stack, we are pursuing all of them," Musk declared. "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."

xAI's Contribution to Tesla

Musk provided a glimpse into the origins of xAI, his generative AI company. He noted that xAI was established because some AI experts preferred working on general artificial intelligence (AGI) rather than 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 explained. "Only then was xAI created."

As a result, Musk said, "Tesla is learning quite a bit from xAI." He added that the collaboration has been beneficial in advancing full self-driving capabilities and building up the new Tesla data center.

Earlier on Tuesday, Musk tweeted about xAI's data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which had started AI model training using 100,000 GPUs from Nvidia. He described it as "the most powerful AI training cluster in the world."

"This is a significant advantage in training the world's most powerful AI by every metric by December this year," Musk added.

Potential Investment in xAI

When asked if Tesla might invest in its sister company, Musk said it was possible. "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. There are opportunities to integrate Grok into Tesla software.

Grok is xAI's first generative AI model, released in November. It is currently available as a feature for paid users of X (formerly known as Twitter).

Robotics and Future Plans

Turning to Tesla's work in robotics, Musk spoke about the Optimus line of humanoid robots. He emphasized that Tesla has all the necessary components to create large-scale, high-utility, generalized humanoid robots.

Musk cited an ARK Invest analysis estimating 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."

Although he kept plans under wraps, Musk hinted at a lower-priced vehicle 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 to deliver a more affordable model in the first half of next year," he said.