Tesla CEO Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI will not license its technology to Tesla, Musk said in a post on X on Sunday. Musk's post denied a Sept. 7 Wall Street Journal article that said two Musk-owned companies had finalized a deal.
WSJ claims
The WSJ article, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, claimed that Tesla will use the AI ​​models developed by xAI for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assistance software. As part of the agreement, xAI will be entitled to a cut of Tesla's revenue.
According to the report, under the deal, xAI will also help Tesla develop other features, including a Siri-like voice assistant.
According to the report, Tesla and xAI executives have agreed to equally split revenue from FSD, which will cost users $99 per month.
Musk's denial
Musk said Tesla executives have gained significant learnings from xAI engineers to help develop FSD and advance the company's development of fully self-driving cars, but noted that “we don't need to license anything from xAI.”
He added:
“Because xAI models are so large and contain most of the human knowledge in a compressed form, we cannot and do not want to run them on Tesla's vehicle inference computers.”
Musk said Tesla's AI models are “incredibly 'dense' (in a good way) intelligence,” because they must compress video of the road and real world and translate it into driving commands in real time, while at the same time being small enough to run on much smaller computers that have size and bandwidth limitations.
Musk added:
“Tesla's Real World AI has a much larger context size than LLM, as the combined video history from all cameras is several gigabytes in size.”
Musk founded xAI in July 2023. Though it's a relatively new company, Musk believes it has the potential to become a major contender in the space. Earlier this month, the xAI team brought its Colossus 100,000 H100 training cluster online, which is expected to double in size in the coming months.
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