Elon Musk says Tesla’s biggest medium-term risk may not come from competitors, demand or even regulation.
Speaking during Tesla’s latest earnings call, Musk says Tesla currently holds a decisive advantage in AI efficiency, particularly in how its systems handle memory and logic.
According to Musk, the advantage puts Tesla in a strong position today, but it does not eliminate future vulnerability.
“I actually think Tesla is ahead of the rest of the world in intelligence density of AI by an order of magnitude or more. This is going to sound like a pretty bold statement, but I know what the intelligence efficiency of the big models is like Grok and a bunch of the other models. Tesla’s AI is, in terms of memory efficiency, I think, more than an order of magnitude better. The Tesla AI is very compute-efficient and very memory-efficient.”
He says the efficiency advantage matters because it directly affects Tesla’s ability to scale AI systems across vehicles and humanoid robots. According to Musk, Tesla has solved the near-term challenges around AI logic and memory, but longer-term scaling depends heavily on global chip supply.
“So that puts us in a pretty good position for scaling. We do think that we do have a solution for logic and memory for, let’s say, the next roughly three years.
But if you start going beyond three years, and we look at the scaling plans, and how many fabs are getting built, especially if you factor in geopolitical uncertainty, there’s always a risk that maybe those chips don’t arrive that people were expecting to arrive. That’s why I think we need to have more fab capacity in the US just in case chips stop arriving for any reason.”
Musk says the chip supply issue is an existential threat to Tesla’s humanoid robotics ambitions, particularly Optimus, which he notes cannot function without advanced AI hardware.
“This is really existential for Tesla, Inc. because Optimus is completely useless without an AI chip. At least the cars, we can put steering wheels and pedals in, or retrofit them if need be. But Optimus is just a mannequin without [the chips]. It’s like the Tin Man or whatever, The Wizard of Oz.”
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