Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Friday that his latest venture, the artificial intelligence startup xAI, will collaborate with the automaker in both the “silicon front” and the “AI software front.”
In a live audio session on Twitter Spaces, Musk also mentioned that xAI will utilize Twitter data to train their artificial intelligence systems and products, which are designed to be highly inquisitive. However, Musk did not disclose whether Twitter will charge xAI or his other companies for the data.
When Musk led a buyout of Twitter in October 2022, the social media company took on $13 billion in debt. Twitter has faced challenges in boosting its subscription revenue and has been sued by former employees and vendors for non-payment.
Multiple companies that Musk either founded or leads, such as Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Co., have already conducted business together for years. Some of these transactions have been disclosed in Tesla’s financial filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
During the audio session, Musk made an unsubstantiated claim that “Every AI organization on Earth” has illegally used Twitter’s data for training. It remains unclear which specific laws would have been violated through data scraping. Twitter recently filed a lawsuit against four unidentified parties for data scraping in Texas.
Musk stated that Twitter implemented rate limits on its platform due to excessive scraping. He expressed regret for the inconvenience caused by rate limiting and mentioned that his organization plans to use public tweets, excluding private content, for training purposes like many others.
Musk expressed interest in using Twitter’s data for “text training,” “image and video training,” and highlighted the need for AI systems to utilize more than just human-created data. He hoped that xAI could emulate Alphabet-owned DeepMind’s Alpha Zero, a computer program that achieved mastery in games like chess, shogi, and go after training with itself.
Omar Qazi, a Tesla fan and promoter, asked Musk questions regarding the collaboration between xAI and Tesla, specifically in terms of data processing using silicon made by Nvidia or Tesla. Musk deferred the question to Tesla and mentioned Tesla’s customized silicon, which he characterized as akin to a GPU.
Although Tesla has been promising a self-driving vehicle for several years, none of its vehicles currently have the capability to operate without human intervention. Musk discussed Tesla’s hardware advancements, including the newly released hardware 4, which is three to five times more capable than the previous version. He also teased the future release of hardware 5, expected to be four or five times more capable.
Musk shared details about Dojo, a supercomputer being developed by Tesla for AI machine learning and computer vision training. Tesla utilizes video clips and data from customer vehicles to enhance existing software and develop new features.
Musk acknowledged that the AI model developed by xAI may not be “politically correct.” He stated that their AI could generate answers that some people might find controversial, despite their accuracy. Musk emphasized the need for xAI to understand the physical world, not just the internet, and expressed belief that Tesla’s driving data would contribute to that understanding.
Author Walter Isaacson, who wrote a biography of Elon Musk set to be released later this year, asked about Optimus, a humanoid robot Tesla is developing for manufacturing purposes. Musk noted that the robot is still in the early stages, and his team needs to create an easily accessible off switch.
Tesla previously unveiled a design of the humanoid robot called Optimus during its AI day in September 2022. More updates on this project and others are expected to be shared by Tesla executives during an upcoming earnings call.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed reporting.