Elon Musk has denied a report by The Wall Street Journal suggesting that his AI startup, xAI, was in talks with Tesla about a revenue-sharing deal in exchange for access to xAI’s technology and resources.
The rumored arrangement would involve Tesla licensing xAI’s AI models to enhance its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, with Tesla sharing some of the resulting revenue with xAI, according to unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
The report also indicated that xAI would help develop additional features for Tesla, including a Siri-like voice assistant for its electric vehicles and software for the humanoid robot Optimus.
Musk responded to the WSJ article on September 7, stating, “Haven’t read the article, but the above is not accurate.” He clarified that while Tesla has benefited from discussions with xAI engineers, these exchanges have accelerated the development of unsupervised FSD, there is no need for Tesla to license technology from xAI.
The Tesla CEO added that xAI’s models, which contain vast amounts of compressed human knowledge, are not compatible with Tesla’s vehicle inference computers and would not be suitable for use. He explained that Tesla’s AI models are specifically designed to operate efficiently on limited computing power, such as a 300W computer with far lower memory and bandwidth than high-powered GPUs like the H100.
“Tesla real-world AI also has a vastly larger context size than an LLM, as the combined video history from all cameras is several gigabytes in size,” Musk said, highlighting the unique challenges and specifications of Tesla’s AI technology compared to traditional large language models.
Sometimes you just can’t believe what’s in the news it seems, according to Musk.
