FYI: Elon Musk clarifies misconceptions about Tesla’s alleged licensing deal with xAI, stating there is no need for such an arrangement.
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# Elon Musk Denies WSJ Claims on Tesla Licensing AI from xAI
Elon Musk has refuted a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report suggesting a possible deal between Tesla and the AI startup xAI that involves the electric vehicle giant licensing xAI’s models to enhance technologies such as Full Self-Driving (FSD). According to Musk, Tesla has no necessity to license anything from xAI.
## The WSJ Report and Investor Insights
The WSJ, citing sources familiar with the discussions, claimed that Tesla and xAI proposed a deal where Tesla would license xAI’s artificial intelligence models to aid in powering FSD. The report suggested that xAI would receive a portion of FSD’s revenue in return. Additionally, it was rumored that xAI might develop other functionalities for Tesla’s vehicles, including a voice assistant similar to Siri and software for Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus.
## Musk’s Clarification on Social Media
In response to these claims, Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to set the record straight. While admitting he hadn’t read the entire WSJ article, Musk called the report inaccurate. He acknowledged that Tesla has gained substantial insights from its discussions with xAI engineers which have been instrumental in advancing unsupervised FSD but emphasized that Tesla does not need to license xAI’s models.
“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,” Musk asserted.
## Differences in AI Models
Musk elaborated on the significant differences between the AI models being developed by the two companies. He highlighted that xAI’s models are extraordinarily large, encapsulating much of human knowledge in a compressed form, which makes them impractical to run on Tesla’s vehicle inference computers.
“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,” Musk explained. He continued to praise Tesla’s AI models for their dense intelligence, which efficiently translates reality into driving commands while operating on a relatively modest ~300W computer with limited memory size and bandwidth.
## The Path Forward
Musk also shed light on the incredible contextual size Tesla’s real-world AI handles, which involves several gigabytes of video history from vehicle cameras—a scale vastly larger than typical large language models (LLMs).
In conclusion, it appears that while Tesla and xAI are aligned in their technological pursuits and Tesla benefits immensely from the collaboration, there is no necessity or current plan for Tesla to license AI models from xAI. This clarification underscores the distinct yet complementary AI advancements both companies are making.
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Authored by William Kouch, Editor at Automotive.fyi
