In a recent response, Elon Musk has rejected claims that Tesla is considering sharing revenue with xAI, another one of his ventures, to utilize its artificial intelligence models.
The Wall Street Journal reported that under a potential agreement presented to investors, Tesla was set to incorporate xAI’s models into its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Additionally, the startup was positioned to assist in developing a voice assistant for Tesla vehicles and enhancing the software for its humanoid robot, Optimus.
Taking to his social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), Musk commented that he had not yet reviewed the WSJ article but deemed a summarized post about it as “not accurate.”
He stated, “Tesla has benefitted from interactions with xAI engineers, which have expedited the progress towards achieving unsupervised FSD, but there is no necessity for licensing anything from xAI.” Musk further elaborated that the models produced by xAI are impressively expansive, encapsulating a vast amount of human knowledge in a compact format, thus making them unsuitable for operation on Tesla’s vehicle inference computer, nor is there a desire to use them in that way.
Musk originally founded xAI to serve as a rival to OpenAI, with which he was once associated but later distanced himself. Earlier this year, TechCrunch revealed that during a pitch for xAI’s $6 billion funding round, the startup portrayed a vision of training its models on data from Musk’s various enterprises, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X, to enhance technology across these firms.
In light of these developments, Tesla shareholders have initiated a lawsuit against Musk, asserting that he has redirected talent and resources from Tesla to what they view as a competing endeavor.
Elon Musk Twitter Announcement: “Haven’t read the article, but the above is 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. The xAI models are gigantic, containing, in compressed form, most of human knowledge, and couldn’t possibly run on the Tesla vehicle inference computer.”