Elon Musk and Tesla executives hosted a Q&A webcast after the company’s earnings release on the afternoon of 4/24/2024. The team covered a wide variety of topics during the hour-long webcast. Below are five key takeaways: what you need to know.
Takeaway: The robots are coming! (Tesla plans on it, anyway)
During Q&A, Musk fields a question about Tesla’s “Optimus” — “a general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks.” Musk describes details about the state of Tesla’s AI capabilities: “I mean, this, perhaps, is a point that is worth emphasizing Tesla’s AI inference efficiency is vastly better than any other company. There’s no company even close to the inference efficiency of Tesla. We’ve had to do that because we were constrained by the inference hardware in the car. We didn’t have a choice.”
But what does that mean — what is “inference”? Inference refers to an AI model’s ability to accurately and efficiently process data input by successfully performing the tasks for which it was trained. Tesla was very bullish on its AI market superiority during the webcast.
Takeaway: Tesla has a plan for cutting regulatory barriers to unsupervised autonomous driving
When asked how Tesla plans to tackle regulatory blockades to its autonomous driving product, Tesla’s executive team had a clever answer. Musk and VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy described that several U.S. states have already started to adopt autonomous vehicle laws. Although they didn’t detail how convenient such legislation was for Tesla’s autonomous mission, they stated that these laws would support the broader adoption of driverless vehicles.
Musk made a clever statement about the matter: “I think if you’ve got at scale a statistically significant amount of data that shows conclusively that the autonomous car has, let’s say, half the accident rate of a human-driven car, I think that’s difficult to ignore because at that point, stopping autonomy means killing people. So, I actually do not think that there will be significant regulatory barriers, provided there was conclusive data that the autonomous car is safer than a human-driven car.”
While he makes a valid point, the significant burden of conclusive safety data falls on autonomous driving trailblazers like Tesla and Waymo.
Takeaway: Tesla Plans to Release a $25,000 Vehicle Model
When webcast participants asked Tesla’s executive team about a timeline for a more affordable $25,000 vehicle offering, they said that Tesla would reveal its plans for this model and changes to its vehicle lineup on August 8, 2024.
Takeaway: It’s All About the Fleet
Elon and his team took several opportunities to communicate the revenue-generating power of the Tesla vehicle fleet to webcast listeners: “But really, the way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet. And I think it might be the biggest asset value appreciation history when that day happens when you can do unsupervised full self-driving.”
They made claims about monetizing idle cars, comparing their robo-taxi capabilities to business models like AirBnB. Individual vehicle owners could conveniently commit their cars to the Tesla Robo-taxi fleet in exchange for revenue sharing. They further described that even when individuals don’t have their vehicle actively working in the taxi fleet, the car could share its computer processing capabilities. While robo-taxi fleet revenue sharing sounds like a reasonable company strategy sometime in the future, Tesla’s team didn’t discuss any timelines for such features during the webcast. Such features depend on Tesla first delivering autonomous driving.
Takeaway: Tesla Has Access to a Ton of Data
Tesla has an incredible capability of collecting data from its vehicle fleet and using it to train its autonomous driving neural net software.
Per Musk, “So, we now have over 300 billion miles that have been driven with FSD V12 since the launch of full self-driving — supervised full self-driving. It’s become very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy.”
Tesla investors expect the company to leverage this massive training dataset to deliver level 5 autonomous driving and revolutionize the global transportation industry.
Musk and his team are ahead of the curve, expanding their capacity to process these large video data sets — “We also continue to expand our AI training capacity in Q1 more than doubling our training compute sequentially.”
Listen to Tesla’s webcast on X
If you’re interested in browsing the webcast’s full transcript, you can see it here