Comment on Elon Musk says Tesla is an AI company now. Here’s how plausible that is.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Tesla has always been an AI company. They’ve had tons of machine learning going on in their cars basically as long a they’ve existed. What exactly is changing? Are they going to start trying to use generative models like GPTs in their cars?
For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you’re selling or making money off of.
So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.
Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.
So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.
Nobody really thought of AI as an independently marketable product before the AI bubble though. And many “AI companies” now have some kind of hardware product they are attaching their AI offering to. I’d circle back to the Apple example. They are a tech company and a phone company, but they also have Siri. That probably required a significant amount of R&D behind the scenes. Maybe we wouldn’t call them an AI company in the same sense as OpenAI, but they’ve probably been selling an AI assistant as a feature in their products for longer than OpenAI has been selling ChatGPT.
Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.
Lol that’s funny. I’d wholeheartedly agree with that assessment. But in my mind it’s more about where the operating budget goes, not where the revenue comes from.
There are no AI companies until anyone can demonstrate actual intelligence. LLMs are not intelligent. Self-driving car systems are not intelligent. Machine learning is not intelligence.
I don’t disagree, but ML and AI are both meaningful terms in the field of computer science, neither of which is meant to be understood as actual human intelligence. Research into self-driving cars is AI research. Regardless of the success of that technology.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
By this logic, any car company with any advanced driving aids are “AI” companies, and therefore the likes of VW, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai, Jaguar, etc aren’t actually car companies.
Come off it. They’re car companies. It’s just that one of their car’s features is some function that relies on machine learning.
You may as well call Ford a cup holder company by this logic - after all, they’ve had cup holders for so long now!
aren’t actually car companies.
You’re making the same assumption many others in this thread do that “AI company” and “car company” are non-overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. In my view this is as ludicrous as saying that “Apple is a phone company, not a software company”
For them to be an AI company, they first have to sell self driving and not a pipe dream.
To reply to your edit.
You can mentally categorise whatever you like into whatever you want. It doesn’t mean anyone else will agree with you, or even understand what you’re saying. You have the right to express your categorisation. But don’t whinge and whine when no one else agrees with it.
Who’s whinging and whining? I’m just explaining my reasoning. I actually am fascinated by the discussion that’s developed here. I’m amazed at how upset people are getting about this. I made the above comment as a genuine question about what exactly is meant to change about Tesla following this statement from Elon. Like what exactly it means that he’s acknowledged his company is heavily invested in AI development. I never would have guessed the semantics would be so controversial as to give me maybe my most heavily downvoted comment ever.
People are saying I’m using mental gymnastics, logical fallacies, bringing up completely irrelevant examples including Amber Heard and 1984 for some reason (???). People just love to find any reason to get outraged up I guess.
Maybe people interpret any comment in a thread about Tesla as supportive if it doesn’t begin with a virtue signalling “Fuck Elon” (which TBF, I agree with. Fuck that guy. But I don’t really think it needed to be said for my comment)
No one is “upset” by your comments. If anything, it’s been a wonderfully pointless discussion over semantics, and how one person saying one thing can mean something entirely different to everyone else. And then watching you repeatedly double down is crazy
Have you considered that you could just be wrong, and that’s why you are getting down voted?
Honestly the closest thing I can think of is the fact that techically every Tesla is a compute node for Tesla that can be tasked to not only process local data but also other cars data.
That’s a great observation. They’ve put a lot of resources into their OTA update system. They could abuse that for lots of other things like distributed computing if it were profitable for them to do so, even if it introduces additional risk for their drivers.
Oh they explicitly do that now. They talked about at length during a share holder meeting and its why hackers were able to find another cars photos on the systems they’ve exploited.
Damn that’s wild
breadsmasher@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“We are a car company we sell cars. We have machine learning for self driving”
to
“We are an AI company”.
It hasn’t always been an AI company. They are an automotive company suddenly shifting gears
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I guess if you think AI and car are mutually exclusive. I would have described Tesla as an AI car company.
breadsmasher@lemmy.world 1 month ago
What AI products, except their broken self driving feature, does tesla sell?
pennomi@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Ugh you guys can be so deliberately obtuse. Yes, if a company makes revenue from an AI offering, and spends a significant amount of their money developing that AI offering then yes, it can be considered an AI company. Just because the feature is stupid or dangerous doesn’t invalidate that accounting.
Enjoy a little nuance from time to time.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Tesla has always invested heavily in their software. Just because it has always been shitty doesn’t diminish that it was an outsized part of their business model, especially compared to other car companies