Elon Musk, Tesla, Twitter planning xAI partnership

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that he plans to work with automakers on both the “silicon side” and the “AI software side” of his latest venture, the artificial intelligence startup xAI. Stated.

Musk also said in a live audio session at Twitter Spaces on Friday that xAI will use Twitter data to train “extremely curious” artificial intelligence systems and products it hopes to build there. He also said. Musk declined to say whether or how much Twitter would charge xAI or his other companies for the data.

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Twitter took on $13 billion in new debt when Musk led the acquisition of the social media venture in October 2022. The company has struggled to generate subscription revenue and has been sued by former employees and vendors for unpaid work and severance pay for completed work.

Several other companies Mr. Musk was founder or CEO of, including Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company, finished business together Many years. Some of their deals are disclosed In Tesla’s financial reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk on Friday claimed, without providing evidence, that “every AI organization on the planet” had used Twitter data “illegally in all cases” for training. It wasn’t clear which laws the data scraping by others violated.earlier this month on Twitter Sued four unidentified parties For data scraping in Texas.

Twitter introduced rate limits on its social media platform in recent weeks because it was “crazy scraped,” Musk claimed. “Several organizations were scraping every single tweet ever made and were trying to do it in a matter of days,” he said. So we had to act.” He apologized for the inconvenience caused by the rate limit.

Given the extensive use of Twitter data by AI software developers, Musk said that “basically, public tweets (obviously not private) are used for training, just like everyone else is using.” will also be used,” he said.

Twitter’s dataset calls for “text training” and “image and video training,” Musk said. But he said AI systems need more than human-generated data, and he hoped xAI would follow in that footsteps. alphabet– Owned DeepMind’s Alpha Zero, a computer program that has trained against itself in three games of Chess, Shogi, and Go, before reaching a proficient level of play in those games.

Tesla fan and promoter Omar Kazi (known on Twitter as “The Whole Mars Catalog”) told Musk how much xAI plans to work with Tesla during the space event. I asked a question. He asked, among other things, if xAI might use silicon from Nvidia or Tesla for data processing.

“That’s kind of a question for Tesla,” Musk said. “Tesla develops custom silicon. I don’t want to call what Tesla makes a ‘GPU’, but it’s the equivalent of a GPU.” I can put it on,” he said. He then talked about Tesla’s in-vehicle hardware that allows the company’s advanced driver assistance systems to work in the car. The system is marketed in the US with autopilot and fully autonomous capabilities.

For years, Tesla has promised fans robo-taxis, or self-driving cars. Musk said at the time that cross-country demonstrations in Tesla cars would be possible without human intervention by the end of 2017. In 2019, Tesla raised billions in promises to deploy 1 million robo-taxis-enabled Tesla vehicles. road one year later. So far, none of Tesla’s vehicles can run without a human driver ready to take the wheel and apply the brakes.

Musk said on Twitter Spaces on Friday that Tesla’s Hardware 4, which is shipping now, is “three to five times more capable than the Hardware 3,” and that a “Hardware 5” is coming within a few years. , “Four to five times more powerful than the current version.”

The CEO also mentioned Dojo, a supercomputer Tesla is developing for AI machine learning and computer vision training. Tesla uses video clips and data from customer vehicles to improve existing software or develop new features.

Musk said the final AI language model that xAI will likely develop is not “politically correct.” The CEO, who has repeatedly attacked “awakened” and progressive values, said, “Our AI may cause people controversy, even if it’s actually true.” I don’t think I can give you an answer,” he said.

Tesla’s CEO said xAI needs to develop technology that “understands the physical world, not just the internet,” and believes Tesla’s driving data can help in that regard.

Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk’s biography to be published later this year, asked Musk about Optimus, the humanoid robot Tesla is developing for use in the manufacturing industry. Musk said the robot is still in its “early stages” and his team needs to find an easy way for users to turn it off.

Tesla is design AI Day in September 2022 to present work on a humanoid robot called Optimus. Tesla executives are expected to share this and other updates at next Wednesday’s earnings call.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Bunyan contributed reporting.