Elon Musk has denied reports that his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI has held talks about a share of Tesla’s future revenue in exchange for Musk’s electric vehicle maker access to xAI’s technology and resources.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that Tesla would license xAI’s AI models to power its driver-assist software and fully self-driving car technology and share a portion of the proceeds with the startup, under a proposed arrangement described to investors.
“Tesla learned a lot from conversations with engineers at xAI, which helped accelerate the realization of unsupervised FSD, but there is no need to license with xAI,” Musk posted on his social media platform X on Saturday night, adding that the report was “not accurate.”
Citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, the magazine reported that xAI would support the development of other features for Tesla, including a voice assistant in Tesla’s electric cars and software to power the humanoid robot Optimus.
The terms of any potential revenue-sharing agreement between xAI and Tesla would depend in part on Tesla’s reliance on xAI’s technology compared to its own, the report said. xAI executives also reportedly discussed an equal split of revenue from Tesla’s FSD.
xAI could not be reached for comment.
Musk launched xAI last year to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, sparking concerns that he would allocate some of the automaker’s resources to the AI firm.
He said xAI would be “useful in the development of fully self-driving cars and in the construction of Tesla’s new data center,” adding that there was potential to integrate xAI’s chatbot, Grok, with Tesla’s software.
In July, the billionaire CEO said he and Tesla’s board would discuss investing $5 billion (approximately Rs 41,979 crore) in xAI.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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