Tesla CEO Elon Musk bragged about his company’s internal advancements in AI, including hardware and chip design, saying he’d choose the company’s in-house work over any alternative.
“There’s actually is not a chip from Nvidia—or from any company—that we would prefer to put in our car that is better than what we have in the car,” he said. “We started from scratch in chip design, just as we started from scratch in AI software, and have the best real-world AI software and the best AI inference chip in the world— from nothing.”
His remarks came during a presentation and Q&A following the company’s closely watched shareholder meeting, where holders of Tesla stock voted to re-approve Musk’s controversial $56 billion pay package—still subject to judicial review—as well as a move of its corporate headquarters from Delaware to Texas, according to a report by Bloomberg.
To wrap up the event, he took to the stage to discuss the company’s plans for its lines of vehicles, automotive software, robotics, and AI.
Central to Tesla’s long-terms plans is its goal of full self-driving (FSD) cars, and Musk claimed Tesla’s tech is the best.
“Tesla also writes a lot of software internally,” Musk told the audience. “The Tesla operating system internally is head and shoulders above what any other company has, I think probably better than any Fortune 500 company that has internal software—it’s just way better.”
“Taking a video and making decisions based on the video? No one is close, and it’s getting better with each passing month, if not passing week,” he added.
Describing Tesla as far more than a car company, Musk took aim at rival AI developers.
“Tesla is also the leader in real-world AI,” Musk said. “Tesla is ahead of Google, Meta, OpenAI, anyone on real-world software.”
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, has been in a public battle with the CEO of the premier generative AI developer. He recently railed against Apple’s deal to put ChatGPT on its devices, saying they would be banned from his companies. While he sued OpenAI for breach of contract in March, he withdrew his lawsuit without comment on Tuesday.
The CEO—who also leads SpaceX and co-founded Neuralink—separately founded xAI, a generative AI company that offers a chatbot called Grok on X (aka Twitter).
Musk also touted his company’s work on the hardware side.
“It’s also worth noting that Tesla is pretty good at chip design—the AI inference chip that was designed by Tesla is in cars,” Musk said. “We had our hardware three AI inference [chip]; cars made over the past year had the hardware four, we’ve just completed design on hardware five, which we’re now calling AI five.”
Musk also mentioned Tesla’s work in robotics, highlighting its Optimus humanoid robots, which he said are already working in Tesla’s factory and offices.
“We have two Optimus robots in our Fremont factory that are doing tasks, which is taking cells off the line and placing them in a shipping container,” Musk said. “We actually have quite a few of these cruising around in our offices in Palo Alto.” The Tesla CEO said he expects to see 1,000 Optimus robots working at Tesla.
Rival OpenAI also has robots on the market through robotics startup 1X, in which OpenAI has invested since 2022.
Musk said he’s bullish on the future of humanoid robotics, telling the audience that while the market capitalization for autonomous transport is between $5 to $7 trillion, he estimated that Optimus’ market cap would be $25 trillion.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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