Betting on Musk’s AI Empire
XAI raise, Tesla FSD in China, Republic First Bank collapse, OpenAi x FT, China's SenseTime #1 AI in world, AI Safety Board, Google AI Fund, Synthesia + more
∆ Tech in the News
First Blood 2024 - Regulators agreed to sell Philadelphia’s failed Republic First Bank to Fulton Bank, which launched a stock offering to support the buyout.
AI Licensing - The Financial Times signed a deal with OpenAI to license its content for AI model training and allow ChatGPT to answer queries with summaries attributable to the publisher.
World's #1 AI? - Chinese AI firm SenseTime’s new ~600B parameter SenseNova 5.0 beats GPT-4 Turbo across nearly all key benchmarks.
AI Safety and Security Board - The new body featuring Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Jensen Huang will advise the DHS on deploying AI within the U.S.
AI Splash - Google announced a $3B investment to expand its U.S. data center campuses as well as a $75M AI Opportunity Fund to upskill in AI.
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Why Smart Money is Betting on Musk’s AI Empire
It’s clear smart money is betting on Elon to deliver results with his AI empire. Last week news broke that xAI is close to raising $6B for 25% of the firm valuing it at ~$18B from Sequoia (and possibly Future Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and Gigafund). Also last week, on Tesla’s Q1 earnings call Musk reiterated that it is an “AI and robotics company” rather than an automaker.
Empire Synergies
In xAI’s $6B sales pitch, Musk’s corporate empire; Tesla, X social, Neuralink, and SpaceX was a major selling point. For one, xAI will gain access to vital training data from across this empire. Conversely, xAI’s tech could help Tesla achieve its dream of truly autonomous vehicles and robotics. Musk sees xAI as a brand to "connect the digital and physical worlds" and integrate his various corporate missions with “a super-intelligent AI to understand the universe".
Autonomous Robotics
Musk also updated Tesla investors on the Optimus autonomous robots, making it clear he believes Optimus will be ‘more valuable than everything else combined’ and ‘a majority’ of Tesla’s long-term value. Musk also stated the bots will be working in Tesla factories by the end of 2024, and for sale by 2025.
Musk also teased screenshots of the ride-hailing feature that allows users to summon Teslas for rides. We recently featured how this Robotaxi revenue share model could drive a $21T robotics revenue generator. Musk explained this further in a talk, stating that flipping “several million cars” from manual to autonomous “will be the single biggest asset value increase in history.”
Distributed AI Compute
Elon Musk posted on X last week that the integration of xAI’s Grok chatbot with Tesla’s is ‘coming’. However, he also dropped a bombshell idea of turning Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI by harnessing a fleet of 11 million cars to generate “100 gigawatts of inference compute, distributed all around the world.”
Regulatory hurdles remain a big blocker for expanding Tesla’s FSD and robotics vision in the U.S. but China may have just outflanked them by opening the door to Tesla’s FSD in China, in partnership with Baidu for mapping. A successful China roll-out could prove Musk’s claim FSD will be 10x safer than human drivers and see the U.S scrambling to deregulate to keep up.
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“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. We will, and we are.”
― Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
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