Elon Musk Denies AI Partnership Payment Between Tesla and xAI

Elon Musk has clarified that his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, will not be earning revenue from Tesla in exchange for sharing its AI technology. The statement comes after a Wall Street Journal report suggested xAI was in talks with Tesla about sharing technology in return for payment.

Clarification on xAI and Tesla Partnership

In a Sept. 8 post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk denied the claims, stating that xAI models are far too large to be used in Tesla’s vehicle systems. “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.

Impact on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Capabilities

Musk explained that while xAI engineers have contributed insights that accelerated Tesla’s progress in achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD), there is no need for Tesla to license any technology from xAI. Tesla’s AI models are already highly efficient, processing real-world video data to generate driving commands. These models run on a 300W computer, far less powerful than the H100 GPUs used in xAI’s systems.

The Scale of Tesla’s AI System

Musk emphasized that Tesla’s AI system, which interprets video data from multiple vehicle cameras, processes several gigabytes of information in real time. This gives Tesla’s AI a much larger context size compared to traditional large language models (LLMs). The AI models in Tesla’s vehicles are designed to operate on hardware with significantly less memory and bandwidth than high-end GPUs.

xAI's Ambitions and the Colossus Supercomputer

Founded in July 2023, Musk’s AI startup xAI aims to become a major competitor in the AI space. Musk revealed that xAI brought its Colossus supercomputer online on September 2, powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Over the coming months, this cluster is expected to double in size, becoming the most powerful AI training system available with 200,000 GPUs. Colossus was developed in partnership with Nvidia, one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers.