Recently, a report on revenue sharing emerged surrounding the partnership between Tesla and Musk’s AI company xAI, which attracted widespread attention. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Tesla plans to use xAI technology to improve autonomous driving software and other functions and pay for it. The report involves xAI’s software that may assist Tesla in developing its voice assistant and humanoid robot Optimus.
Recently, Tesla founder Elon Musk strongly refuted a media report on the social platform X (formerly Twitter). The report pointed out that Tesla and Musk’s AI company xAI intend to share revenue so that Tesla can use xAI’s AI model.
This news was first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, mentioning that Tesla plans to use xAI technology to improve the capabilities of its autonomous driving software (fully autonomous driving, referred to as FSD). In addition, xAI may also help Tesla develop voice assistants and software for Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus.
However, Musk denied this. He said he had not read the report, but he dismissed a user's summary post as "not accurate." He emphasized that Tesla did get some help in communicating with xAI engineers and accelerated the progress of unsupervised FSD, but it did not need to license anything to xAI. Musk added that xAI’s models are so large and contain compressed versions of human knowledge that they simply cannot run on Tesla’s vehicle inference computers, nor does Tesla want to do so.
It is worth mentioning that Musk founded xAI to compete with OpenAI, of which he was a co-founder but later chose to leave. As early as this year, TechCrunch reported that xAI mentioned in its $6 billion financing plan that the company's model plan will be trained based on data from Musk's companies in order to improve the technical capabilities of each company.
Tesla shareholders, however, are concerned and have filed a lawsuit against Musk, arguing that he diverted talent and resources from Tesla to what is essentially a rival company.
Highlight:
Musk denied reports Tesla had revenue sharing with xAI, saying the information was inaccurate.
?Tesla’s cooperation with xAI does not require authorization, and xAI’s models cannot run on Tesla vehicles.
Shareholders are dissatisfied with Musk's founding of xAI and have filed a lawsuit against him.
Musk’s denial and shareholder lawsuits have made the relationship between Tesla and xAI even more confusing. The future cooperation model and potential conflicts of interest between the two parties still require continued attention. This incident has once again highlighted the complexity of internal governance and interest distribution within large technology companies.