Elon Musk denies Tesla will pay xAI for AI technology partnership

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Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, has clarified that his artificial intelligence startup xAI is not looking to earn revenue from Tesla in exchange for sharing its technology. 

The clarification comes after a Wall Street Journal report claimed that xAI has discussed sharing its technology with Tesla and in return would earn revenue from the carmaker. 

“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 wrote in a Sept. 8 X post. 

Elaborating on the electric vehicle’s full self-driving (FSD) capabilities, Musk added:

“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.”

Related: OpenAI business users top 1M, targets premium ChatGPT subscriptions

Musk stated that Tesla’s AI models exhibit remarkable intelligence by translating videos of the real world into driving commands. These models run on a 300W computer with memory and bandwidth far less than what an H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) offers.

Source: Elon Musk

Musk said Tesla’s real-world AI has a significantly larger context size than a large language model (LLM), thanks to the combined video feed from all cameras, which amounts to several gigabytes of data. 

Musk sees xAI emerging as a tough competitor for OpenAI

In July 2023, Musk founded his own AI company, xAI. Although xAI is relatively new compared to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, it has the potential to emerge as a significant competitor by the end of 2024, claims Musk. 

On Sept. 2, Musk said that his team at xAI has brought its Colossus 100,000 H100 training cluster online. Over the next couple of months, it will double in size, bringing it to 200,000. 

Colossus is now touted as the most powerful AI training system available, a claim supported by the sheer number of graphics processing units (GPUs) driving the model. The model was developed in partnership with Nvidia, the world’s leading semiconductor chip manufacturer.

Related: Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ gov meme sends political speculation soaring

Musk to serve America without pay or recognition

Former United States president Donald Trump recently said he would create a government efficiency commission, with Musk as the head of the new government institution, if Trump claims the Oval Office again in the November 2024 election. 

Source: Elon Musk

In reaction to Trump’s statement, Musk said that he looks forward to serving America if the opportunity arises and does not need any pay, title or recognition for it.

On Sept. 5, Trump reaffirmed his support for the digital asset industry. He said that, if elected, he would do away with a minimum of 10 old regulations for one new regulation.

He also said that instead of attacking industries of the future, he intends to embrace them, including making America the world capital of crypto and Bitcoin.

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