Elon Musk is asking customers of his social media platform if his automotive firm ought to make investments in his AI platform.
The world’s richest man launched the non-binding, informal poll on X — previously Twitter — late Tuesday (July 23), hours after saying throughout an earnings presentation that Tesla would proceed its synthetic intelligence (AI) investments.
“Should Tesla make investments $5B into xAI, assuming the valuation is about by a number of credible exterior buyers?” he wrote.
Musk stated the spending would wish the approval of Tesla’s board and shareholders, “so that is simply to check the waters.”
As of Wednesday (July 24) morning, the ballot had greater than 689,000 votes, 68% of which have been in favor of the funding.
“We’re investing in many future initiatives, together with AI coaching and inference and quite a lot of infrastructure to assist future merchandise,” Musk stated throughout the earnings name.
The corporate’s autonomy choices powered by AI software program and {hardware} embrace driver help options referred to as FSD (Supervised), its humanoid robot Optimus, and its deliberate autonomous driving and robotaxi service.
Throughout the name, Musk was requested whether or not Tesla would make investments in xAi and combine that firm’s Grok software into its vehicles.
“Tesla is studying fairly a bit from xAI. It’s been really useful in advancing Full Self-Driving and in build up the brand new Tesla knowledge heart,” Musk stated. “Almost about investing in xAI, I believe we’d have to have shareholder approval of such funding. However I’m actually supportive of that if shareholders are.”
As PYMNTS reported, Tesla’s complete revenues climbed 2% 12 months over 12 months, with automotive revenues falling 7%, power technology and storage income rising by 100%, and its providers and different income rising 21%. Nevertheless, the earnings additionally confirmed Tesla’s earnings falling greater than 40%, sending its inventory down on Tuesday.
Musk launched xAI a bit over a 12 months in the past, after months of hinting that he wished to develop an alternative choice to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. He performed a task in the creation of that firm however stepped down from its board in 2018 and has since criticized OpenAI for departing from its authentic mission.
xAI introduced in Could it had raised $6 billion in a Sequence B funding spherical, giving it a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. The corporate stated it might use the funding to take its first merchandise to market, assemble superior infrastructure and speed up its analysis and growth.