Musk's New AI Startup Raises Questions About Tesla Plans.

"The self-proclaimed Technoking sees an AI future and has separate companies pursuing that vision.

But who wins as the technologies of his companies increasingly overlap?

Elon Musk and his kingdom's tentacles were on prime display this past week, raising questions about whether Tesla investors are helped or hindered by the billionaire's latest startup, xAI. The venture is taking advantage of the rush of enthusiasm to develop a humanlike artificial-intelligence technology.

Meanwhile, many investors have long been excited about Tesla's work and plans for deploying AI with driverless cars and humanoid robots.

Tesla isn't a car company, these investors argue. It is a tech powerhouse that can truly deploy this fuzzy thing called AI into the real world -- doing hard, meaningful tasks. Because of that, Musk has even suggested, Tesla is worthy of someday being the world's most valuable company, more than Apple and Aramco combined.

"For investors that think that there might be quite a bit of value in the AI features and products of Tesla, it might be concerning to see you pursuing another endeavor where AI is the focus," William Stein, an analyst focused on AI from Truist Securities, told Musk Wednesday during the automaker's conference call.

Musk said the companies are complementary. "I think it will actually enhance the value of Tesla," he said.

For years, his array of companies might have helped each other out, but their lanes were pretty clear: Tesla, the only one publicly traded, was for cars; SpaceX, for Mars. Boring Co. was for tunnels; Neuralink, for brain computers. Starlink, a product at SpaceX, was for planetary internet; and Twitter, for interpersonal communications.

On the surface, the difference between Tesla and xAI so far comes down to the complexity of the problems they want to address. In trying to deploy fully driverless cars, Tesla has been working on a kind of AI traditionally applied narrowly to a specific task: driving.

In officially rolling out xAI earlier this month, Musk cast his startup as seeking to explore much bigger issues -- the sorts of ideas that have puzzled humanity for generations, like, perhaps, the nature of gravity.

To do that, he wants to develop an advanced AI -- known as artificial general intelligence -- with the hope of achieving what sounds like superhuman intelligence.

Or, as Musk put it, the company's mission statement is about creating an advanced AI that can answer: "What the hell is really going on?"

The rub might come down to details, such as xAI's business plan. Musk was light on those specifics, beyond saying xAI would compete with OpenAI and Google's Bard. The success of OpenAI's generative AI chatbot known as ChatGPT renewed excitement in Silicon Valley that the more advanced AGI is possible after years of theorizing.

Still, Musk has painted Tesla as playing an important role in the AGI future, especially as it works to develop a humanoid robot called Optimus, an offshoot of its driverless-car work.

"I think Tesla's gonna play an important role in AI and AGI, and I think I need to oversee that to make sure it's good," Musk told Tesla shareholders in May. "Generally, people do not -- or very few people, even in the AI community -- do not appreciate just how much capability Tesla has in AI. It's by far the most advanced real-world AI. There's no one even close."

In 2021, the company held an AI Day, which included details of work to develop Optimus and computing power designed for AI, including a supercomputer dubbed Dojo to help development of its driverless-car technology.

On Wednesday, Musk revealed that Tesla is planning to spend more than $1 billion through the end of next year on Dojo, which he said gives the company advantages over rivals looking to train their driver systems with expensive computing power that is in great demand.

Dojo was developed to deal with large amounts of video used in making a driverless-car system, and the current version isn't meant to handle large language models used to create OpenAI-like chatbots. Earlier this month, Musk said the next generation of Dojo will work with such so-called LLMs." [1]

1. Musk's New AI Startup Raises Questions About Tesla Plans. Higgins, Tim. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 July 2023: B.4.