Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models.
The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known as Full Self-Driving or FSD). The AI startup would also help develop features such as a voice assistant in Tesla vehicles and software for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus.
Writing on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk said he hadn’t read the WSJ story, but he described a post summarizing the report as “not accurate.”
“Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI that have helped accelerate achieving unsupervised FSD, but there is no need to license anything from xAI,” he wrote. “The xAI models are gigantic, containing, in compressed form, most of human knowledge, and couldn’t possibly run on the Tesla vehicle inference computer, nor would 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 the pitch for xAI’s $6 billion funding round, 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 the decision to start xAI, arguing that Musk has diverted talent and resources from Tesla to what is essentially a competing company.