Elon Musk has refuted claims that Tesla is negotiating a revenue-sharing arrangement with his AI startup, xAI, for the use of its artificial intelligence models.
The Wall Street Journal had reported that under a proposed deal, Tesla would integrate xAI’s AI models into its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. The agreement would also involve xAI in developing additional features for Tesla vehicles, including a voice assistant and software for Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus.
Responding to the report on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk stated that he had not personally reviewed the Wall Street Journal article but labeled a summary of the report as “not accurate.”
“Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI, which has accelerated our progress towards unsupervised FSD,” Musk wrote. “However, there is no necessity to license anything from xAI. The xAI models are enormous, encapsulating most of human knowledge in a compressed form, and are not suited for the Tesla vehicle inference computer, nor would we want them to be.”
Musk, who founded xAI as a rival to OpenAI (a company he co-founded but left), has faced scrutiny over his decision to launch xAI. Reports earlier this year indicated that xAI’s $6 billion funding pitch included a vision where the startup’s models would be trained on data from Musk’s various ventures—Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X—to enhance technology across these companies.
Tesla shareholders have raised concerns, filing a lawsuit against Musk, alleging that the creation of xAI diverts talent and resources from Tesla to what they view as a competing enterprise.
Philips Babatunde