Brain computer interface, autonomous driving, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence big models, the world's most advanced satellite company, Mars immigration program
From a perspective, the true core of Elon Musk's overall industrial layout lies in artificial intelligence, which is also his biggest driving force for development. In recent years, people have been holding their breath for the latest advances in AI technology, but Musk is the fastest and boldest person to commercialize artificial intelligence.
Brain computer interface and autonomous driving
In the field of brain computer interfaces, Neuralink under Musk undoubtedly has a strong presence and can even be said to be a leader in the industry.
In September, Neuralink announced that its blind vision technology had obtained breakthrough medical device certification from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Blindsight device is currently in the experimental stage, and its function is to convert neural signals and transmit them to external electronic devices such as computers or smartphones. Musk revealed through social media platform X that this technology has the potential to enable people born blind to gain visual perception without damaging their visual cortex.
The last time Neuralink stood in the center of public opinion was also recently. In August, Neuralink announced the completion of the second human transplant of a brain computer interface device, allowing the transplant recipient to use their mind to control the cursor, play electronic games, and perform other unimaginable operations after surgery.
Although the technology related to brain computer interfaces is not yet mature, Neuralink has undoubtedly led the revolution of integrating the brain with computers and AI, and has also opened up unlimited imagination space for brain computer interfaces.
In the field of autonomous driving, Musk's industry is also at the forefront.
On the upcoming October 10 local time (October 11 Beijing time), Tesla plans to display its highly anticipated Robotaxis (named "Cybercab") and automatic driving technology FSD (English abbreviation of Full Self Driving Full auto drive system). Musk boasted with his usual mouth and mouth that this would be a grand event that would go down in history and could be Tesla's largest event since launching the Model 3.
Although Tesla's investors and analysts all hope that Musk can launch affordable electric vehicles below $25000 as soon as possible, his focus is on showing off his distinctive full auto drive system.
Google's self driving taxi Waymo has long been in operation in cities such as San Francisco, but in Musk's view, his Cybercab is the invincible one, not to mention that fully autonomous intelligent driving technology will gradually arm all vehicles in Tesla's system, which is incomparable to any other car company. So far, Tesla has sold over 6.5 million vehicles worldwide.
Without a doubt, China is Tesla's most important market. On September 28th, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory produced its one millionth car. This batch of Model 3 will be loaded onto ships from the adjacent Shanghai Nangang Port and shipped to the UK.
Tesla delivered a total of 444000 new vehicles in the second quarter of this year, exceeding market expectations by 439300 vehicles, mainly due to sales contributions from China and the United States that exceeded expectations. According to monitoring analysis, as of September 11th, Tesla's vehicle deliveries in Europe have decreased by over 16% this year. It is expected that Tesla's registration volume in China will increase by 20% in the third quarter compared to the previous quarter.
Before launching new product lines, Robotaxi and FSD were considered the most important sources of incremental revenue for Tesla in the near future. Internationally renowned analysts believe that Robotaxi will bring considerable revenue growth to Tesla. But its operational schedule has not been announced yet, so it seems a bit early to talk about contributing profits.
Tesla FSD will be the first to be commercially available. According to reports, in March of this year, 1.8 million vehicles in the North American market were tested using FSD, with a monthly fee of $199 per user package, which may be subject to a reduction.
Some Tesla cars produced and sold in China have updated the FSD button, which is located in the cruise control and Autopilot menus, similar to the layout of North American models, but this feature is currently not enabled.
Elon Musk announced during Tesla's Q2 2024 earnings conference call on the early morning of July 24th that he expects the FSD feature to be approved in China by the end of this year.
In May of this year, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the National Computer Network Emergency Technology Coordination Center certified that Tesla meets four data compliance requirements of regulations, namely anonymization of facial information outside the car, default non collection of cabin data, cabin data processing inside the car, and significant disclosure of personal information processing. This means that domestic authoritative institutions recognize Tesla's data security. Subsequently, Tesla cars entered the government procurement catalogs of some provinces and cities. After its official release in October, Musk may quickly deploy FSD functionality into the Chinese market.
The Tesla automotive industry chain is the biggest carrier of Musk's artificial intelligence dream.
Humanoid robots and xAI
In terms of indirect related aspects of the automotive industry, Musk is also leading in the layout of humanoid robots.
The use of industrial robots in factories is not new, but what Musk wants is not standardized industrial robots or semi humanoid robots that replace legs with wheels. Instead, he wants to produce humanoid robots that can replace all workers' operations in one step. This is Optimus. Currently, it has been iterated to the second generation.
Automotive automation is the most complex industrial field in terms of processes. However, humanoid robots face much more complex processes and dimensions than autonomous driving. The former operates in a completely 3D world, while the latter requires safe driving of cars and avoiding collisions with any objects in a 2D world.
The common problem with humanoid robots is that on the one hand, there is not enough data to train the robot model, and on the other hand, there is no suitable model architecture to digest massive amounts of data. The Tesla humanoid robot team spent three years almost spinning in place.
In the past two years, the development of artificial intelligence, especially large model technology, has provided a possible evolutionary path for humanoid robot technology. In 2022, Tesla will transplant the machine vision neural network from FSD onto Optimus. Last year, we recruited adults to be Optimus' teachers (covered in sensors), and we plan to extract key data from massive human motion videos as the corpus for Optimus' learning, in order to accelerate its deep learning speed.
Optimus humanoid robots have been mass-produced for hundreds of units, with a cost of approximately $100000 per unit. There is still a long way to go to reach Musk's expected $20000 per unit, and the key is that the commercial value of these humanoid robots is not high. For example, at the Austin factory in the United States, they can only do some battery handling work, and their efficiency is extremely low - far less than manual labor, let alone industrial robots.
Nevertheless, Musk has not given up on his extreme pressure tactics and dreams. Several international exhibitions held in China this year, such as the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, the World Robot Conference in Beijing, the Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services, and Optimus humanoid robots, have all participated. Moreover, the Tesla team keeps repeating Musk's goal to achieve an annual production of 1 billion Optimus humanoid robots and occupy over 10% of the market share.
But at the World Robot Conference, 21st Century Business Herald reporters saw that Musk's Optimus only stood quietly in the glass window and did not participate in the "technology show" of many manufacturers with their own strengths.
Musk's ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence are comprehensive. Whether it's Neuralink, Optimus, Robotaxi, or FSD, they are all part of Musk's artificial intelligence landscape. Not only that, he also founded an artificial intelligence technology company called xAI in July last year.
This startup is making rapid progress. In May of this year, xAI announced the completion of a $6 billion Series B financing. On August 13th, the early beta version of the language model Grok-2 was officially released. It can recognize and generate graphs, and its performance is comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4o. It is considered one of the most powerful language models today.
Grok-2 was trained on approximately 15000 Nvidia H100 processors. At the end of August this year, xAI also launched a supercomputer cluster called "Colossus", which has 100000 Nvidia H100 processors and is the world's most powerful AI training system. According to Musk's disclosed plan, xAI will train and launch a new generation of large model Grok-3 in the cluster by the end of this year.
Elon Musk co founded OpenAI in 2015, but later withdrew due to significant differences in the company's development direction. His lawsuit against OpenAI in August this year has not yet been decided; Now, the rising star xAI has put on a posture of directly competing with OpenAI and determining its superiority.
Although Musk acknowledges that he initially lagged far behind OpenAI in terms of AI big model chat tools, his achievements in brain machine interfaces, autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and other applications indicate that Musk's industries are far ahead of OpenAI in creating the artificial intelligence applications needed for the physical world.
He had already announced his ambitious Mars immigration plan through SpaceX, but that would be at least 20 years from now. As far as its subsidiary Starlink is concerned, it is the world's most advanced satellite company, launching over 7000 satellites. The satellites operated by the company account for over half of all active satellites in orbit worldwide. SpaceX can be regarded as the most advanced and comprehensive deep application of artificial intelligence in the manufacturing industry.
Despite his flamboyant personality and extreme actions, Musk is undoubtedly one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the world from a business perspective. His Tesla, SpaceX and their Starlink divisions, X, Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI have all made achievements, which is equivalent to three times the number of companies (Apple and Pixar) that Steve Jobs led during his peak.
His pursuit in the field of AI is also an important school of thought in the entire artificial intelligence industry.
In April 2023, Musk proposed three major goals to the xAI team: first, to develop an AI robot capable of writing computer programs, and second, to develop a competitor to OpenAI ChatGPT that uses algorithms and training datasets that ensure political neutrality. The third goal is even more ambitious, and its primary task has always been to ensure that the development of AI contributes to the continuity of human consciousness. The best way to achieve this goal is to create a universal artificial intelligence that can maximize the pursuit of truth from the perspective of protecting humanity.
Google founder Larry Page once jokingly accused Musk of being a "speciesist" who only favors the survival of his own species during a conversation. That's right, I support putting humanity first, "Musk responded," I just love humanity, brother