Tesla is so good at AI it may have to "nerf" its chips outside US, Elon Musk tells investors

Tesla has better AI than Google and its stablemate xAI, chief executive Elon Musk told investors on Wednesday night.

It is, in fact, so good that it is starting to be a problem.

The company released Q2 numbers for what it said was the period in which it started a "seminal" transition from being a car-and-energy company "to also becoming a leader in AI, robotics and related services."

Speaking during an earnings call, however, Musk did not speak of Tesla starting to be a leader, but claimed supremacy in the field.

"Tesla is by far the best in the world at real AI," he said, pointing to Google-incubated Waymo – which is by most measures well ahead of Tesla in self-driving cars – as proof. 

Intelligence density

Waymo cars are "festooned with God knows how many sensors," said Musk. "And yet isn't Google good at AI? Yes, but they are not good at real world AI... Tesla is actually much better than Google by far".

Waymo vehicles use lidar and radar, while Tesla uses only cameras.

xAI's Grok is "the smartest AI overall", said Musk, but it is "a giant beast", and loses to Tesla's systems as measured by intelligence density.

That, he argued, was a better measure of AI: intelligence per gigabyte, or counting RAM rather than parameters. 

Musk also said Tesla's Optimus 3 humanoid robot design has been perfected, and that he would be surprised if Tesla was not manufacturing 100,000 per month by 2030.

See also: Elon Musk reveals challenges of employing AI engineers who are "only interested" in AGI

Asked where in its own production Tesla is using Optimus robots, Musk spoke for several minutes without answering the question. He later suggested Optimus units could clean and maintain Tesla robot taxis, and said it was serving popcorn at the Tesla diner.

The AI5 version of the Tesla chip that underpins its self-driving will "be a profound game changer", said Musk.

"It's so powerful that we'll have to nerf it to some degree for markets outside the US because it blows way past the export restrictions. So unless the export restrictions change, we actually will have to nerf our AI5 chip, which is kind of weird."

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a series of orders on AI that calls for America to "secure our continued technological dominance" in the field.

His administration's export controls have continuously irked the chips market, with NVIDIA claiming limits on the capabilities of chips sent to China had made it impossible for the company to provide a product "for any productive use" in the country.