Elon Musk denies reports that xAI is in talks to license AI models to Tesla

In addition to serving as CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter), businessman Elon Musk founded the AI startup 'xAI' in July 2023. In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that 'xAI is in talks with Tesla about a deal to license its AI models to Tesla in exchange for receiving a portion of Tesla's revenue,' but Musk denied the report.

Exclusive | Musk's xAI Has Discussed Deal for Share in Future Tesla Revenue - WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e22313

Musk denies report his xAI in talks over Tesla revenue | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-xai-talks-share-future-tesla-revenue-wsj-reports-2024-09-08/

Elon Musk says Tesla has 'no need' to license xAI models | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/08/elon-musk-says-tesla-has-no-need-to-license-xai-models/

xAI is developing a generative AI called 'Grok,' and an AI chat function using Grok is already available on X. In March 2024, Grok was open-sourced , and in April, the company announced 'Grok-1.5,' a multimodal AI with performance comparable to 'GPT-4V' and 'Gemini Pro 1.5.'

In May, the company successfully raised $6 billion (approximately 940 billion yen at the time) from a number of investors and has been expanding rapidly.

Elon Musk's AI company 'xAI' raises about 940 billion yen to recruit talent for AGI development, and also reveals plans to deploy 100,000 H100 units - GIGAZINE

According to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, xAI is discussing a deal in which it would license its AI models to Tesla to support its driver assistance software , Full Self-Driving (FSD) , in exchange for sharing a portion of Tesla's revenue with xAI. It has also been reported that xAI will cooperate in the development of software for a Siri-like voice assistant in Tesla's electric vehicles and for the humanoid robot Optimus .

The Wall Street Journal noted that Tesla would hand over AI development to another company run by Musk in exchange for a cut of the revenue, 'adding to the tech mogul's growing practice of freely sharing assets across his business empire.'

In fact, it has been reported that Musk had ordered 12,000 of Tesla's high-performance chips, the H100, to be shipped to xAI in the past. At the time, Musk claimed that Tesla simply did not have a place to store the chips.

Musk also stated that posts to X will be used to train xAI's AI models.

Elon Musk says, 'We will use AI to learn from tweets and use it to help Tesla' - GIGAZINE

In response to this report, Musk said, 'Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with xAI engineers and accelerated the realization of unsupervised FSD, but does not need to obtain any license from xAI. xAI's models are huge and contain most of the human knowledge in a compressed form, so it is not possible, nor do we want to run them on the inference computers in Tesla cars. Tesla's AI models compress real-world footage into driving operations, so they have incredibly dense intelligence, but they need to run on computers of about 300W, which have much smaller memory size and bandwidth than the H100 GPU, for example. Also, Tesla's real-world AI has a much larger context size than large-scale language models, because the combined size of the video history from all cameras is several GB. ' He denied this.

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…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 8, 2024