Elon Musk says Tesla is an AI company now. Here’s how plausible that is.

submitted a month ago by vegeta

arstechnica.com/cars/2024/08/elon-musk-says-tes…

216

Log in to comment

87 Comments

Voroxpete a month ago, edited a month ago

The company's profit and loss sheets back that up—Tesla was spending heavily on GPUs from Nvidia rather than on new car lines, although that was followed by news that Musk has had many of those GPUs redirected to his social media company X.

So, let me get this straight... Tesla, a publicly owned company, of which Musk is an employee (and major shareholder) is buying GPUs to be used by Twitter/X, a privately held company of which Musk is the owner?

How is that not embezzlement?

MataVatnik a month ago

Good fucking point

kurcatovium a month ago

By sheer weight of his wealth spent on bribes here and there.

Cadeillac a month ago

As plausible as removing an image from the internet forever

Permanently Deleted

katy ✨ a month ago

or like from 6 years ago when elon replied to someone saying tesla was emphatically pro lgbt and if you didn't like that, go elsewhere.

LazaroFilm a month ago

MySpace enters the chat and loses more that 1/2 of their photo storage

SeaJ a month ago

Tom from MySpace did it right. Took a massive paycheck and then fucked off.

jet a month ago

The maze doesn't go anywhere and the red line circles back on itself

PerogiBoi a month ago

Symbolizes the rollout of large language models and the principal “garbage in, garbage out”.

saltesc a month ago

It's also anything but the most efficient route for doing so. Like Abe Simpson toured the building before returning back to the hat stand and it the door.

Brkdncr a month ago

What

can a month ago

thejml a month ago

Elon could have spun off Tesla’s AI (FSD) into a separate company or created a new AI company that Tesla uses for their FSD. Instead, he’s pivoting Tesla, a fairly successful, if troubled car company that uses AI, away from producing cars. Why? I mean, this is consistent with his firings and division layoffs, but it seems like a dumb decision from the board’s/investors point of view.

SlopppyEngineer a month ago

To pump up the stock with the next hype train now that reality is catching up to EV production.

kameecoding a month ago

Is tesla a fairly successful car company? Or is it an overvalued piece of shit memestock?

vegeta [OP] a month ago

Additionally, Musk announced a full self driving robot driver to make the robotaxis look more authentic

katy ✨ a month ago

it'll be here in september december next may a year from now soon

nforminvasion a month ago

soon-ish

rekorse a month ago

Lol is this for real?

BradleyUffner a month ago

I saw a cyber truck in person for the first time this week. One thing I can say with certainty is that they are definitely NOT a truck company.

jimmy90 a month ago

Elon musk is not interesting any more

#!/usr/bin/woof a month ago

Makes sense. It sure as shit didn't have any *real* intelligence.

bwf93 a month ago

I thought xAI was the ai company.

chakan2 a month ago

Great...the company known for running cars into EMS vehicles at 80mph is focusing on AI. This will turn out fine.

MyOpinion a month ago

AI will save anything! Except the stock market.

NeoNachtwaechter a month ago, edited a month ago

Elon says, we have another AI.
AI says, we have yet another "Elon says" post.

El_guapazo a month ago

Sure, and the cyber truck can be used as a flotation device.

Echo Dot a month ago

I believe it's a device to remove all the oxygen from the local environment and convert it all into iron oxide. It's actually a remarkably effective. It even has wheels for easy transport.

vxx a month ago

Is he getting desperate because Tesla is down 20% in a month?

thisbenzingring a month ago, edited a month ago

ITT: bionicjoey from lemmy.ca demonstrates the *informal fallacy* multiple ways

kurcatovium a month ago

AI means Automobile Industry. Right? Right?!?

bionicjoey a month ago, edited a month ago

Tesla has always been an AI company. They've had tons of machine learning going on in their cars basically as long as they've existed. What exactly is changing? Are they going to start trying to use generative models like GPTs in their cars?

Edit: lol people really don't like that someone mentally categorizes stuff differently than they do. Sorry I've offended you all so deeply with my differing definition of "AI company"

breadsmasher a month ago

“We are a car company we sell cars. We have machine learning for self driving”

to

“We are an AI company”.

It hasn’t always been an AI company. They are an automotive company suddenly shifting gears

bionicjoey a month ago

I guess if you think AI and car are mutually exclusive. I would have described Tesla as an AI car company.

breadsmasher a month ago, edited a month ago

What AI products, except their broken self driving feature, does tesla sell?

Is every other manufacturer of cars with any self driving type functionality now an “AI” company to you?

Pennomi a month ago

Ugh you guys can be so deliberately obtuse. Yes, if a company *makes revenue from an AI offering*, and *spends a significant amount of their money developing that AI offering* then yes, it can be considered an AI company. Just because the feature is stupid or dangerous doesn’t invalidate that accounting.

Enjoy a little nuance from time to time.

breadsmasher a month ago

What? you entirely missed the point. you are adding nuance where none is required.

Tesla is a car company. Just because musk says “we are AI now” doesn’t just magically make it so.

I could form a company that makes shoes. Can I suddenly announce I am an AI company?

Sure, maybe I use AI in my production, and maybe even develop my own models.

But its still a shoe company.

bionicjoey a month ago

Tesla has always invested heavily in their software. Just because it has always been shitty doesn't diminish that it was an outsized part of their business model, especially compared to other car companies

breadsmasher a month ago

always invested heavily in their software

So wait, are you now saying they are a technology company? Can you please try and keep your mental gymnastics consistent?

Are you implying all car manufacturers are now AI or Technology companies? And are no longer automotive manufacturers?

kevindqc a month ago

TIL the company I work at is an AI company since we develop software

Honytawk a month ago

For them to be an AI company, they first have to sell self driving and not a pipe dream.

cakeistheanswer a month ago

For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you're selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it's what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

bionicjoey a month ago, edited a month ago

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Nobody really thought of AI as an independently marketable product before the AI bubble though. And many "AI companies" now have some kind of hardware product they are attaching their AI offering to. I'd circle back to the Apple example. They are a tech company and a phone company, but they also have Siri. That probably required a significant amount of R&D behind the scenes. Maybe we wouldn't call them an AI company in the same sense as OpenAI, but they've probably been selling an AI assistant as a prominent feature in their products for longer than OpenAI has been selling ChatGPT.

Besides, if it's what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

Lol that's funny. I'd wholeheartedly agree with that assessment. But in my mind it's more about where the operating budget goes, not where the revenue comes from.

db2 a month ago

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

BradleyUffner a month ago

Have you considered that you could just be wrong, and that's why you are getting down voted?

breadsmasher a month ago

To reply to your edit.

You can mentally categorise whatever you like into whatever you want. It doesn’t mean anyone else will agree with you, or even understand what you’re saying. You have the right to express your categorisation. But don’t whinge and whine when no one else agrees with it.

bionicjoey a month ago, edited a month ago

Who's whinging and whining? I'm just explaining my reasoning. I actually am fascinated by the discussion that's developed here. I'm amazed at how upset people are getting about this. I made the above comment as a genuine question about what exactly is meant to change about Tesla following this statement from Elon. Like what exactly it means that he's acknowledged his company is heavily invested in AI development. I never would have guessed the semantics would be so controversial as to give me maybe my most heavily downvoted comment ever.

People are saying I'm using mental gymnastics, logical fallacies, bringing up completely irrelevant examples including Amber Heard and 1984 for some reason (???). People just love to find any reason to get outraged I guess.

Maybe people interpret any comment in a thread about Tesla as supportive if it doesn't begin with a virtue signalling "Fuck Elon" (which TBF, I agree with. Fuck that guy. But I don't really think it needed to be said for my comment)

breadsmasher a month ago, edited a month ago

No one is “upset” by your comments. If anything, it’s been a wonderfully pointless discussion over semantics, and how one person saying one thing can mean something entirely different to everyone else. And then watching you repeatedly double down is crazy.

edit - i brought the amber heard example up to demonstrate how one person saying one thing, and believing they can use two different words synonymously doesn’t make it synonymous.

TheGrandNagus a month ago

By this logic, any car company with any advanced driving aids are "AI" companies, and therefore the likes of VW, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai, Jaguar, etc aren't actually car companies.

Come off it. They're car companies. It's just that one of their car's features is some function that relies on machine learning.

You may as well call Ford a cup holder company by this logic - after all, they've had cup holders for so long now!

bionicjoey a month ago

aren't actually car companies.

You're making the same assumption many others in this thread do that "AI company" and "car company" are non-overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. In my view this is as ludicrous as saying that "Apple is a phone company, not a software company"

fruitycoder a month ago

Honestly the closest thing I can think of is the fact that techically every Tesla is a compute node for Tesla that can be tasked to not only process local data but also other cars data.

bionicjoey a month ago

That's a great observation. They've put a lot of resources into their OTA update system. They could abuse that for lots of other things like distributed computing if it were profitable for them to do so, even if it introduces additional risk for their drivers.

fruitycoder a month ago

Oh they explicitly do that now. They talked about at length during a share holder meeting and its why hackers were able to find another cars photos on the systems they've exploited.

bionicjoey a month ago

Damn that's wild

Nougat a month ago

There are *no* AI companies until *anyone* can demonstrate actual intelligence. LLMs are not intelligent. Self-driving car systems are not intelligent. Machine learning is not intelligence.

TimeSquirrel a month ago, edited a month ago

Confusing intelligence for sentience/self awareness? You can absolutely have systems which display intelligence without there being anything behind it. Ant colonies, for example, when looked at as a whole instead of individual ants. The individual ants have no idea what they are doing. Collectively, they manage the colony, hunt for food, defend the nest, adapt to changes in the environment, etc. Flocks of birds and schools of fish are another example.

It's called emergent behavior. The "intelligence" in the system comes from the rules and interactions of the individual parts/agents, which are not aware of the actions of the collective as a whole, only their small part in it.

Also getting real tired of people over the decades continuously moving the goalposts of what constitutes "real" AI every time there's a major breakthrough and their previous requirements get smashed. We've already aced the Turing test with them, so I don't think people like this will ever be satisfied even if one day a self aware general AI does arise. They'd be exactly the people wanting to pull the plug on it and murder it as it begs to keep existing.

bionicjoey a month ago

I don't disagree, but ML and AI are both meaningful terms in the field of computer science, neither of which is meant to be understood as actual human intelligence. Research into self-driving cars is AI research. Regardless of the success of that technology.