Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so it could use the startup’s artificial intelligence models.
The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday: Under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla will use xAI models in its driver assistance software (known as Full Self-Driving, or FSD). The AI startup will also help develop features like voice assistants in Tesla vehicles and software for Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus.
He writes on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter): Musk said He had not read the Wall Street Journal article, but called the publication summarizing the report “inaccurate.”
“Tesla learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI that helped accelerate unsupervised FSD, but there is no need to license anything from xAI,” he wrote. “xAI’s models are huge, contain most of human knowledge in a compressed form, and can’t run on a Tesla vehicle inference computer, nor do we want them to.”
Musk founded xAI as a competitor to OpenAI (which he co-founded but eventually left). TechCrunch reported earlier this year that as part of xAI’s $6 billion funding round pitch, the startup outlined a vision where its models would be trained on data from Musk’s various companies (Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X), and its models could then improve technology across those companies.
Tesla shareholders have sued Musk over his decision to form xAI, alleging that Musk diverted talent and resources from Tesla to a competitor.