Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[nativewolf]

They don't need the factory right now - true.
(By the way, my original post did not constrain the chip factory to producing D1 chips.)

Teslas stated stretch goal is 20 million cars a year in 2030.
How many Tesla Bots a year in 2030?
How big would DOJO need to get in order to support both self-driving cars and AI learning for medium to complex humanoid robot tasks? 10X? 100X? 1000X?
How many other robotic companies will follow Teslas lead and develop different form factor robots using Tesla sillicon and Dojo as a service? And perhaps buy chips from Tesla?

Then add somewhere around 20x that amount of, in comparison, simple chips used for controling the car or robot.
So perhaps 3 lines: 1 line for Tesla Vision, 1 for misc. control-chips, and one for Dojo chips.

Would supporting the annual production of above be sufficient demand for a chip factory?

Elon imagines the future.
If something is definitely needed in 9-10 years and possible needed in 5 years he starts working towards that goal.

Tesla energy also has to be a somewhat large consumer of chips, super chargers, etc. Altogether I could see Tesla consuming a Fab output. It does not make it a good decision just that they could use the output.

Lots of custom silicon being made for many high tech applications by very very deep pocketed firms and no one is rushing to build fabs. That is both a warning sign and maybe an opportunity. You may have to buy a foundry just to get the IP, Globalfoundaries could be one.

 

[jhm]

Whole Mars Catalog on Twitter: "@elonmusk @FutureJurvetson @Tesla @karpathy In your view how does Tesla Bot relate to Tesla’s mission?" / Twitter

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@WholeMarsBlog @FutureJurvetson @Tesla @karpathy Bot is not directly on the path of accelerating a sustainable energy future, but it aspirationally improves the probability that the future is good" / Twitter​

I think Musk is being awfully conservative, understated in this response. He could make a stronger case that the Tesla Bot project will support Tesla in pursuit of its mission. Specifically, Tesla Bot will help Tesla
1) Attract and retrain top AI and robotics talent
2) Engage and motivate talent in creative, lateral thinking along the frontiers of AI and robotics
3) Challenge Tesla talent to build verbal and nonverbal communication bridge with humans (critical to highly adaptive vehicle autonomy)
4) Build more realistic simulation environments for testing of autopilot safety
5) Accelerate manufacturing ramp up and avoid risk to auto manufacturing workforce, including testing of ergonomic risks peculiar to the human form
6) Generate brand awareness and public enthusiasm for all Tesla products
7) What else?

Perhaps Musk did not want to enumerate all these ways the Bot will aid Tesla in its mission, but I thoroughly expect that Tesla will make these connections as they develop Bot. The challenges and opportunities are huge. Tesla will be among the first organizations to realize these advantages, which best positions them to succeed in their core mission.

 

[jhm]

Later this year, Google TPU v4 will be available for rental in their datacenters. It will be incredibly expensive, as is Google TPU v3. Tesla is better off building their own silicon to precisely match their model training needs, with enough generalization capability that they can rent time on their virtually-sized D1 clusters later on to make big $$$ just like $GOOGL does.

Check the Venture Beat article on Google TPU v4. Specs are vague, but TPU v3 is fully released with specs. Tesla's version 1.0 effort with their D1 chip is very impressive for their 1st gen IMHO.

PS. Google does not "sell" any of their Tensor Processing Units for obvious reasons, and $TSLA will not sell their D1 or future D#'s, either. When Elon had to pause before answering that "will you open source any of your code" question (so we can steal your IP), as an investor I almost lost my dinner! Finally, Elon gave the correct answer: NFW!!

I'd like to challenge our savvy readers to use rental pricing info from Google TPU (or other) to back into a financial model of what this rental income stream could be worth for Tesla. This could provide investors with a way to financially value Dojo.

 

[LiveLong&Profit]

it is " really " hard .. i am sure Tesla could do it but not sure why they would

building a fab is not in alignment with Tesla mission

I think Musk is being awfully conservative, understated in this response. He could make a stronger case that the Tesla Bot project will support Tesla in pursuit of its mission. Specifically, Tesla Bot will help Tesla
1) Attract and retrain top AI and robotics talent
2) Engage and motivate talent in creative, lateral thinking along the frontiers of AI and robotics
3) Challenge Tesla talent to build verbal and nonverbal communication bridge with humans (critical to highly adaptive vehicle autonomy)
4) Build more realistic simulation environments for testing of autopilot safety
5) Accelerate manufacturing ramp up and avoid risk to auto manufacturing workforce, including testing of ergonomic risks peculiar to the human form
6) Generate brand awareness and public enthusiasm for all Tesla products
7) What else?

Perhaps Musk did not want to enumerate all these ways the Bot will aid Tesla in its mission, but I thoroughly expect that Tesla will make these connections as they develop Bot. The challenges and opportunities are huge. Tesla will be among the first organizations to realize these advantages, which best positions them to succeed in their core mission.

Agree.
He was subdued and a bit cagey about the many, many job roles even a simple version one of a Tesla Bot could fulfil. No negative press needed.

Also, as have been discussed here many times: The general population is not really ready for self-driving cars or robotaxis. It is not easy to change sentiment of billions of people.
In that sense, the Tesla Bot is a kind of shock therapy: Once you see that robots are really walking around in the world, self-driving is just 'meh'.

 

[mickle]

Whole Mars Catalog on Twitter: "@elonmusk @FutureJurvetson @Tesla @karpathy In your view how does Tesla Bot relate to Tesla’s mission?" / Twitter

Elon Musk on Twitter: "@WholeMarsBlog @FutureJurvetson @Tesla @karpathy Bot is not directly on the path of accelerating a sustainable energy future, but it aspirationally improves the probability that the future is good" / Twitter​

So Tesla's new mission statement should be "improving the probability that the future is good".

As they start developing new products in the future that are off-track, a new statement like that might work better.

 

[Krugerrand]

Gordon Johnson said Tesla’s AI event showed they use simulated data for their neural net training and lied about using real world data from the fleet.

Steven Mark Ryan offered this gentle correction:

I’ve wondered the same thing for awhile, low IQ or liar? So I listened carefully to how he talked, what he said. I watched his face and body language.

He’s a liar and his level of intelligence is just enough to make him dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous as in a threat to Tesla, I mean dangerous to himself.

The final liar determination for me was how he answered Gene’s last question. The answer to that question is yes or no. Mr. Gordon answered, though, like a scripted politician. And that’s what I believe is going on - Mr. Gordon picks a specific point if ‘partial truth’ and then manipulates it by building an elaborate script around it that contains both that piece of. truth and a bunch of lies.

It is true Tesla is using simulations, but it’s not true that that’s all they’re using, or that that’s all they’ve ever used or all the rest of the crap he’s spewing. But he leaves in that nugget of truth, which is actually super smart (and plain evil) because it makes opposition admit the truth - BUT - and it’s the ‘but’ part where people start to get suspicious or turn off. I love you, BUT (now comes something I’m not going to like).

Tesla does use simulations, BUT (here comes the huge qualifier etc… so I’m not listening any further).

 

[BornToFly]

It will take a lot of time before those robots are more intelligent than the dumbest human.

I don't know. I'm pretty sure my daughter has a robotic dog from Walmart that is already smarter than Gordon for GLJ "Research"

 

[JRP3]

In other news, does anyone here remember Chris ? I can’t recall what was his anonymous user id here.

EDIT: I found him!! maybe against forum rules to link the two.. he’s posted here recently

I don't remember him but he seems rather negative towards Tesla's efforts:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1428671634131628033

 

[JustMe]

I don't remember him but he seems rather negative towards Tesla's efforts:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1428671634131628033

Dang, it sounds like Tesla should hire some folks to help with all of that work!

 

[powertoold]

I don't remember him but he seems rather negative towards Tesla's efforts:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1428671634131628033

He posts a lot of negativity in the TMC autonomous cars forum

 

[Discoducky]

If you look at the event from a pure recruiting perspective, then the outcome you want is to get **just** get the brightest, youngest and highest bandwidth minds. I think they've excited that crowd in spades.

Also, I think the android idea is way out there time-wise. But also think about the kinds of products that Tesla will be making in 5 to 10 years. Most likely Tesla will have solved cars; it is a bit crazy to think, but largely they'll have a ton of compute, AI researchers and data scientists clamoring to solve bigger and bigger problems.

While I don't know exactly how the thinking went to arrive at this idea, it might have been something along these lines...

0. hey, so, we have come a long way with this FSD thing and we had to build a huge, wait, many huge datacenters full of GPUs/DPUs and soon, like 10 or so more ~2 week cycles, we think we'll solve FSD so we'll have a ton of compute left over and slightly bored engineers; what will we do with that?
1. DaaS (Dojo as a Service) comes to mind
2. Yeah, ok, but we'll still have a huge amount of AI compute left over; what then?
3. We'll continue to improve FSD, ya'know re-train, bigger models, better and better and all that
4. Yeahhhhh no, we'll still have an immense amount of compute, we need something bigger.
5. Well OpenAI is trying to solve AGI right, how about we contribute to that?
6. Ugh, still crazy amounts of compute, we need something in house that will be so amazingly, blindingly hard to solve
7. Ok, crazy idea, remember that robot Rosie from the Jetsons?
8. I like where this is going....go on!
9. Well, traffic sucks and mundane driving sucks, but so does all those chores and crappy low paying jobs and if a robot does all of that, it could be sustainable than a human doing it from an energy cycle perspective
10. Gotcha, make it look cool, possibly dance, bring it up on stage and I'll talk to it with a simple slide on specs

 

[jhm]

So Tesla's new mission statement should be "improving the probability that the future is good".

As they start developing new products in the future that are off-track, a new statement like that might work better.

I think in Musk's view the point of solving the sustainable energy problem is so that the future has a higher probability of being good. Originally, Tesla's mission was to accelerate sustainable TRANSPORT, but this was later broadened to sustainable ENERGY, which of course is inclusive of transportation. So there is precedent for Tesla clarifying an broading its mission. Perhaps, we should start talking about SUSTAINABLE LIVING.

Along the path to sustainability AI and robotics are important transformative and enabling technologies. Both are critical to making sure that use of energy and other natural resource are as efficient and necessary as possible. For example, years ago one might have thought that video conferencing was not withing scope of a mission for sustainable energy. However, it is now becoming clear that video conferencing enable the economy to pivot away from air travel, daily commuting, and even the need for so much commercial and public building. These are profound changes that impact our ability to decarbonize the economy because they reduce demand for physical resources needed to advance the economy. Fewer airplanes, fewer cars, fewer office buildings, enabled by video conferencing and many other technologies, are terrific stepping stones along the path to sustainability. Right now, we might collectively lack the imagination to see how a Tesla Bot could transform the global economy to need fewer natural resources, but thirty years from now looking back, it will likely be obvious how humanoid robots opened up critical alternatives to burning more fossil fuels and made life on Earth a little more sustainable.

 

[Skipdd]

I’ve wondered the same thing for awhile, low IQ or liar? So I listened carefully to how he talked, what he said. I watched his face and body language.

He’s a liar and his level of intelligence is just enough to make him dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous as in a threat to Tesla, I mean dangerous to himself.

The final liar determination for me was how he answered Gene’s last question. The answer to that question is yes or no. Mr. Gordon answered, though, like a scripted politician. And that’s what I believe is going on - Mr. Gordon picks a specific point if ‘partial truth’ and then manipulates it by building an elaborate script around it that contains both that piece of. truth and a bunch of lies.

It is true Tesla is using simulations, but it’s not true that that’s all they’re using, or that that’s all they’ve ever used or all the rest of the crap he’s spewing. But he leaves in that nugget of truth, which is actually super smart (and plain evil) because it makes opposition admit the truth - BUT - and it’s the ‘but’ part where people start to get suspicious or turn off. I love you, BUT (now comes something I’m not going to like).

Tesla does use simulations, BUT (here comes the huge qualifier etc… so I’m not listening any further).

Yes evil. That is the lesson the last 4+ years has taught me. Facts count. Not calling out relativism, shading of things toward emotional ends or for greater viewership is dangerous and has to be vigorously fought.

 

[Singuy]

He posts a lot of negativity in the TMC autonomous cars forum

Some dude with 200 followers who know some basic computer knowledge keyboard warriors against a 700 hundred billion dollar company with engineers who got into Tesla with an acceptance rate of 0.5%. Why are people even giving these negative Nancy's the time of day? No one gives a rat ass about some dude who haven't created a product that have billions worth of sales.

Also to the bulls, no more hyperbolic statements of what Tesla showed. Can't stand Whole Mars either as he just makes Tesla investors and fan look like a bunch of dumb sheeps.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Some dude with 200 followers who know some basic computer knowledge keyboard warriors against a 700 hundred billion dollar company with engineers who got into Tesla with an acceptance rate of 0.5%. Why are people even giving these negative Nancy's the time of day? No one gives a rat ass about some dude who haven't created a product that have billions worth of sales.

Also to the bulls, no more hyperbolic statements of what Tesla showed. Can't stand Whole Mars either as he just makes Tesla investors and fan look like a bunch of dumb sheeps.

Yeah armchair internet/twitter experts on both sides (so this guy, green, whole mars, etc...) are something I find hilarious to read and also flabbergasted that some actually listen to them.

I'll put it very bluntly......if they were even half of experts as they claim to be...they'd be working at Tesla already. For the past 5+ years straight, Tesla and Space X have ranked #1 and #2 in more desired employment across the engineering and tech space.

You have a select few that know "enough" about the field and don't particularly like Tesla's approach that try and establish themselves as experts in an effort to discredit Tesla's approach. If you're just glancing through their twitter feeds they might fool you. But if you actually following their conversations, actual industry experts that are more knowledgeable than them chime in. That's when it becomes obvious that these people don't actually fully know what they're talking about.

These are the same "types" of people that considered themselves "experts" in auto manufacturing back when Tesla was first starting out. Just a few years later, we're getting things like the GigaPress amongst other Tesla auto manufacturing breakthroughs that completely disrupt the traditional manufacturing "ways".........and lo and behold Tesla is posting margins that also disrupt the traditional auto assumptions. Coincidence?

 

[lafrisbee]

There's also an untold amount of labour currently not done due to lack of workforce or cost benefit analysis.

Thinking back to physical jobs I have experience with - I grew up on a medium sized farm in rural Australia and could easily have put 50 of these robots to work without laying off any of the existing employees. Some examples:

• There were over 1k km's of fencing that could employ 5-10 robots just walking them and recording issues. This was traditionally only done sparingly due to the cost/benefit - but 5 robots at 50k each, with a working life of 10 years ($25k/yr) would make it a no-brainer.
• Currently weeds and burrs are sprayed with herbicide where the spray can reach. You could use 20+ robots to work and weed 10's of thousands of acres that need to be weeded every couple of weeks to eliminate each germination. As a side benefit it would greatly reduce the number of chemicals required to run a farm.
• another 10-20 robots to live with and monitor the stock (1-2 for each herd) and monitor for predators, notify us of any animals are having difficulty giving birth (each saved ewe and lamb would be a min of $600 together - so it wouldn't take many to pay for the robots).
• Then still more robots could be used for other basic tasks - checking pipelines for water leaks, collecting soil samples, collecting samples for worm testing

These are just the simple jobs that could be done by robots that are capable of walking around, understanding their environment and picking up solid objects. If they get to the level where they could manipulate tools even more could be hired for cleaning/repairs/fabrication - and at $50k per robot with a 10 year life, doing these jobs with robots would be an economic decision. Although these more complex operations would likely reduce the human workforce.

DUDE (remember it is OT/Week end), The MD's house on my street that paid a pro landscaper to come in and do a complete re-do of his entire yard and Paid another contractor to design whatever fashionable fake front porch/roof and then repaint the house in the most popular tropical color at the moment, and then tear out the concrete driveway. And now has a gardener come in every season and swap out the annuals, while the gardener's people come in a maintain the lawn and plants...
After a couple of years of my Elon(bot) (yeah I am naming my Optimus Subprime either "elon, or "elonBee" ..or I might start using the "B" word for ro"B"ot... whether calling a robot by its function, SolarBee, or its given name, "elonBee." it could become a universal part of nomenclature. Well back to elonBee, he/it/her(?) could make my home look like something perfect to the level of a Peewee Herman Playhouse dynamic...
And we have this one neighbor who him and his wife do awesome yard decorations for Xmas, Thanksgiving, July the 4th etc... let me see how elonBee can handle that (I have most of the decorations just get less enthusiastic as I get closer to the holiday).
My house could be this when I go to sleep

And THIS 24 hours later:

And what elonB needs he can either order online or go pick up in my cyber(nota)truck from Home Depot at 2 AM. Why 2 AM? because elonB "likes" going when the roads are empty. And he can just deal with other "Bees" instead of stupid dysfunctional humans in the day time.
And another thing, me and the guy down the street that also has his own Optimus Subprime can agree to share, and let our "Bees" coordinate jobs for more efficiency and tasks that require multiple Bees. "Hey Bill, Listen can you let your Bee come down and hold the ladder so ElonBee can paint the second story of my house for a few hours?"
And now I am thinking how my mango trees will be perfectly groomed for aesthetics and production ALL the time, and the fruit picked and on the countertop each morning... Ooops I see something that is going to not be easy for ElonB to do. Squirrel Elimination. I am sure "he" will come up with something, all I'll do is ask.
Mango trees in the backyard after I get my ElonB.

Well, use your imagination... replace the pears with mangos.

My point, the amount of work one Optimus SubPrime can do will equate to the real work of SEVERAL humans. And it will be extremely cheap, and do far better work than most humans. It will transform your personal physical world beyond today's wildest expectations.

I don't know if it is true but I have pretended through my life that it is... They say that Roman Ships were built better than any ships were for the next 1000 years because slave labor was used, and the demands placed on the slave weren't to get it done, but to get it done to perfection regardless of time. So Robots like OptimusB could be programmed on a sliding scale from "Meets current building codes" to Scientific Artisan" depending on various constraints the human wants for the job.

And in closing..if I just had a completely
DUST-FREE home I'd **sugar****************

 

[Krugerrand]

Yes evil. That is the lesson the last 4+ years has taught me. Facts count. Not calling out relativism, shading of things toward emotional ends or for greater viewership is dangerous and has to be vigorously fought.

So the question becomes how to fight it effectively. I believe Gene was on the right track, but either he has a company and personal image he’s loathe to break or he wanted to out clever Gordon, and simply lost a lot of the clear punching power.

Ignore the the bit of the truth and just address/attack/refute the individual lies.

Gordon, Tesla does use video from their vehicles. Example; the talk they did about taking bits of video data from multiple vehicles that have traveled the same intersection and overlaying those images to create a rich environment.

Simply just listing all the ways in which Tesla used video data blows up the script Gordon has created.

I remember seeing someone do that a while back - maybe Rob M. - and Gordon got really flustered because it destroyed the false narrative he’d built around a single nugget of truth. The problem was that Rob? didn’t take it far enough, didn’t put the nail in the coffin per say.

If nobody takes this guy apart in a simple, logical, systematic way, he’ll just keep on doing what he’s doing and get away with it.

 

[jbcarioca]

If you look at the event from a pure recruiting perspective, then the outcome you want is to get **just** get the brightest, youngest and highest bandwidth minds. I think they've excited that crowd in spades.

Also, I think the android idea is way out there time-wise. But also think about the kinds of products that Tesla will be making in 5 to 10 years. Most likely Tesla will have solved cars; it is a bit crazy to think, but largely they'll have a ton of compute, AI researchers and data scientists clamoring to solve bigger and bigger problems.

While I don't know exactly how the thinking went to arrive at this idea, it might have been something along these lines...

0. hey, so, we have come a long way with this FSD thing and we had to build a huge, wait, many huge datacenters full of GPUs/DPUs and soon, like 10 or so more ~2 week cycles, we think we'll solve FSD so we'll have a ton of compute left over and slightly bored engineers; what will we do with that?
1. DaaS (Dojo as a Service) comes to mind
2. Yeah, ok, but we'll still have a huge amount of AI compute left over; what then?
3. We'll continue to improve FSD, ya'know re-train, bigger models, better and better and all that
4. Yeahhhhh no, we'll still have an immense amount of compute, we need something bigger.
5. Well OpenAI is trying to solve AGI right, how about we contribute to that?
6. Ugh, still crazy amounts of compute, we need something in house that will be so amazingly, blindingly hard to solve
7. Ok, crazy idea, remember that robot Rosie from the Jetsons?
8. I like where this is going....go on!
9. Well, traffic sucks and mundane driving sucks, but so does all those chores and crappy low paying jobs and if a robot does all of that, it could be sustainable than a human doing it from an energy cycle perspective
10. Gotcha, make it look cool, possibly dance, bring it up on stage and I'll talk to it with a simple slide on specs

Probably when we consider the tasks Elon mentioned the robotic form factor is almost trivial. Humanoid does add excitement and uncommon advantages, in particular being perhaps more adaptable to non-optimized surroundings. Obviously those housecleaning tasks from vacuums to swimming pool cleaning already are well performed by, say, Roomba and Hayward Tiger Shark. Obviously many others. I do not know enough about the subject to make any technical comment. I do know that the challenge of a general purpose humanoid robot is the stuff of fantasy from every devotee of Isaac Asimov, Elon is one of those too. The present robotic cocktail preparers do a good job, it seems, but they are not yet emotionally supportive. Does not the form factor help in that respect? Otherwise why do it?
Really see no other reason to make robotic animoid and humanoid versions. Maybe I am wrong, after all I know only those room and pool cleaning ones, both of which have saved me quite a substantial amount of money. Then, they both are entertaining to watch for people who did not know about them. How will they react to humanoids?

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Weekend semi-OT, but important for all TSLA investors to follow. This is how it is to be a short seller.

Melvin Capital made it's investors 30% in annualized returns from 2014-2020 taking on very risky leveraged positions both short and long. In 2020 they got themselves into a Gamestop short position that would have drained their funds and bankrupted the firm 10x over. Only to be bailed out by the very market makers taking their "bets".

Ken Griffin of Citadel Securities, who likely held nearly all the Melvin contracts, and archcriminal Steven Cohen bailed out Melvin by investing $2.75B in the firm. Then you may recall buying was frozen for nearly all retail investors trading GameStop shares and options, orchestrated by.....Griffin. This bought Melvin enough time to squeeze out of their short position and stay alive.

This is basically a setup you'd expect in Putin's Russia, not America's "free markets". Sorry to add politics, but I'd consider voting for AOC in 2024 with Warren regulating the financial sector. These leeches and scumbags are buying sports franchises with our money.

Griffin's Citadel plans to redeem $500 mln from Melvin Capital - WSJ

Kenneth Griffin's Citadel LLC and Citadel partners are planning to redeem about $500 million of the $2 billion they invested in Melvin Capital, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.

reut.rs

 

[Chenkers]

If nobody takes this guy apart in a simple, logical, systematic way, he’ll just keep on doing what he’s doing and get away with it.

About the most effective way this could happen is by one of Tesla's lawyers taking him apart on the stand in a defamation trial. Gordon doesn't have much of a truth defence when he outright said that Tesla isn't using real world data and that they've been lying saying they do. But I don't see Tesla going this far, maybe Tesla China would if it happened there as they seem to be more assertive of late.