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

[Thekiwi]

Buying 2020 puts in the morning. The market cap is something silly like 20B since there are 3 classes of shares and only Class A is listed on US markets. This thing is going to tumble below IPO price, the CC was comical

 

[Antares Nebula]

@anthonyj @Fact Checking

Self-driving or autonomous tech is not the hardest AI problem. It is probably the easiest. Elon is right, it will be solved relatively quickly and without LIDAR. Just look to nature:

Observe that early on in evolution, fish or even more primitive creatures figured out object recognition and locomotion. Doesn't take much neurons to do this. Even flies and other insects with micro brains can do this. All it requires are eyes (cameras) and a little processing power (relatively speaking).

More so, driving and walking are easy tasks for humans. Our brains can do so much more. That "more" stuff will be the harder AI problems. Think an AI Doctor, Engineer, etc.

Thus, autonomous driving will be one of the first AI problems to be solved.

 

[anthonyj]

We have much more than "just" Elon's words:

• Firstly, what's this "just Elon" diminutive wording? I'd be the first one to point out that Elon's projections about not yet existing features require a 2x-3x time multiplier, but can you cite a single example of Elon being wrong about the capabilities of existing software and hardware?
• Secondly, we also have the word of Andrej Karpathy, Tesla Director of the AI group, leading NN expert, saying this in the Q3 ER CC: "So in other words, we are currently at a place where we trained large neural networks that work very well, but we are not able to deploy them to the fleet due to computational constraints."
• Third, we have this credible seeming leak from a Tesla employee, who is member of the FSD test group of hundreds of Tesla employees driving HW3 cars with FSD enabled: "Apparently everything is working well at this point (stop signs, street lights, left turns, right turns, etc.)". That was 2 months ago.
• Fourth, numerous long time contributors of this forum have reported that a key FSD feature, Navigate on AutoPilot, is working very well for them on the daily commute and on road trips - with the HW 2.5 processing unit that is 20x slower than HW3.

These are all independent sources of information. The chance that they are all wrong is close to zero meanwhile.

So why are you repeating the "FSD doesn't exist because Elon cannot be trusted" false narrative? Do you want to give shorts a helping hand because there's not enough disinformation out there?



We have evidence of:

• Heavy shorting in the past 3 days
• Certain institutionals such as ARK buying heavily
• Price holding up pretty well under almost 3x the daily volume.

Lots of confusion coming from you too I'm afraid.

Elon Musk in January 2017: 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely

Elon time is real. Who knows, maybe a driver attended FSD does release this year. That would be great. For now, I’m not betting on that happening based on Elon time. Main point is that the early adopters, of a product that they still have not received, were lied to and got screwed

 

[MartinAustin]

Wow! Just woke up and saw this re-tweeted by Vincent, so not sure if this was posted yet. I have a feeling NIO stock is not going to like this today:

"EV startup $NIO abandons plan to make its own cars.
The company won’t build a factory in Shanghai after all, and is off to a slow start in 2019"

EV startup NIO abandons plan to make its own cars

"Chinese EV startup NIO no longer plans to make its own cars, the company announced Tuesday. Plans to build a factory in Shanghai — where Tesla is currently constructing the third Gigafactory — have been scuttled, and NIO will instead continue using its current contract manufacturer, state-owned automaker JAC Motors."

So much for CNBC's "Tesla Challenger Nio."

 

[anthonyj]

@anthonyj @Fact Checking

Self-driving or autonomous tech is not the hardest AI problem. It is probably the easiest. Elon is right, it will be solved relatively quickly and without LIDAR. Just look to nature:

Observe that early on in evolution, fish or even more primitive creatures figured out object recognition and locomotion. Doesn't take much neurons to do this. Even flies and other insects with micro brains can do this. All it requires are eyes (cameras) and a little processing power (relatively speaking).

More so, driving and walking are easy tasks for humans. Our brains can do so much more. That "more" stuff will be the harder AI problems. Think an AI Doctor, Engineer, etc.

Thus, autonomous driving will be one of the first AI problems to be solved.

It may be possible, but it won’t be easy. Check this thread out
Things even FSD won't do
Will FSD be able to follow orders at a police checkpoint? How about if police are directing traffic? Or if my girlfriend wants Qdoba and I want Chipotle?

 

[Remus]

@anthonyj @Fact Checking

Self-driving or autonomous tech is not the hardest AI problem. It is probably the easiest. Elon is right, it will be solved relatively quickly and without LIDAR. Just look to nature:

Observe that early on in evolution, fish or even more primitive creatures figured out object recognition and locomotion. Doesn't take much neurons to do this. Even flies and other insects with micro brains can do this. All it requires are eyes (cameras) and a little processing power (relatively speaking).

More so, driving and walking are easy tasks for humans. Our brains can do so much more. That "more" stuff will be the harder AI problems. Think an AI Doctor, Engineer, etc.

Thus, autonomous driving will be one of the first AI problems to be solved.

Despite of the names, neural networks do NOT work like their biological counterparts.

Despite of the best people on the job with sugar load of investment from many different companies we have no working systems in even geofenced areas.

No it will not be ready in 2 years. No way.

 

[anthonyj]

Despite of the names, neural networks do NOT work like their biological counterparts.

Despite of the best people on the job with sugar load of investment from many different companies we have no working systems in even geofenced areas.

No it will not be ready in 2 years. No way.

The stock would actually be worth $4000 a share if they released a 99% complete FSD, even if not approved by regulators. It really is that big of a deal

 

[Antares Nebula]

@anthonyj

Don't short, be it Tesla or any other stock. Listen to Buffet and Munger. Shorting is extremely hard. It's relatively much easier to make money on the long side. Think about it this way: with all the opportunities in the market, shorting Nio (or Tesla) would be among the top ten (or twenty, etc.) ideas in your portfolio on a risk/reward basis? JM2C

 

[Antares Nebula]

@Remus I don't know what the time frame will be, only that it will be one of the first AI problems to be solved. I'd guess in less than five years, with a pretty good solution within two years from Tesla.

 

[NicoV]

to put pressure on competitors

Personally I think this is one of the things that are seriously underestimated. It creates a situation where an objective prospective EV buyer finds very little arguments to buy something else than a Tesla. It starves the other car manufacturers from the revenue that would give them confidence to do big investments in EV technology and production capacity. It puts ‘EV=Tesla, ICE=the others’ in the minds of the car buying public. This is important, not for todays sales but for sales in the next decade. It is the only way for Tesla to get to the size of Toyota in the next decade. Five years from now, a buyer interested in a Toyota Yaris type of car should immediately think of a Tesla. This will not be the case if Tesla let’s the other manufacturers build cars that are basically equivalent with a Tesla.

 

[MarcusMaximus]

can you cite a single example of Elon being wrong about the capabilities of existing software and hardware?

Hate to make the case on this side, but didn’t he say AP1 would be able to handle freeway-freeway navigation and that summon on it would be able to navigate from your garage to your door? I think he has overstated capabilities before, though he still ends up being able to pull off things nobody thought possible.

 

[kyzhk]

Wow! Just woke up and saw this re-tweeted by Vincent, so not sure if this was posted yet. I have a feeling NIO stock is not going to like this today:

"EV startup $NIO abandons plan to make its own cars.
The company won’t build a factory in Shanghai after all, and is off to a slow start in 2019"

EV startup NIO abandons plan to make its own cars

"Chinese EV startup NIO no longer plans to make its own cars, the company announced Tuesday. Plans to build a factory in Shanghai — where Tesla is currently constructing the third Gigafactory — have been scuttled, and NIO will instead continue using its current contract manufacturer, state-owned automaker JAC Motors."

You almost gave me a heart attack. The first line I read was "The company won’t build a factory in Shanghai after all, and is off to a slow start in 2019"

 

[anthonyj]

@anthonyj

Don't short, be it Tesla or any other stock. Listen to Buffet and Munger. Shorting is extremely hard. It's relatively much easier to make money on the long side. Think about it this way: with all the opportunities in the market, shorting Nio (or Tesla) would be among the top ten (or twenty, etc.) ideas in your portfolio on a risk/reward basis? JM2C

I agree. That’s why I buy puts

 

[Buckminster]

Tesla PR LOL

Hey - Tesla PR work hard:

The weight is correct for the LR AWD, i guess there is a chance the new LR RWD being offered are actually software locked AWD, but i think more likely it is a copy paste error.

The MR weight hasn't changed since it was released, if the pack design has changed it is possible they just forgot to update it.

For SR+ though, the weight is a completely new number added to the system. It's hard to see how they could easily have got this number wrong, and this number alone validates my whole analysis regarding the fixed battery pack weight.

SR weight was also increased to 3,627lbs from 3,549lbs before Thursday. Again it is possible this was a copy paste error from SR+, but given it was deliberately updated I think that's maybe less likely.

So in summary, I'm pretty confident the SR+ weight is correct and hence the SR+,MR and LR all use exactly the same pack structure. For SR there is some possibility the weight is completely wrong - it could be that it is not actually software locked and does already exclusively use a new pack design.

Guessing that Tesla PR department are in charge of weight comms:

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Elon Musk in January 2017: 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely

Elon time is real. Who knows, maybe a driver attended FSD does release this year. That would be great. For now, I’m not betting on that happening based on Elon time. Main point is that the early adopters, of a product that they still have not received, were lied to and got screwed

In fairness, of late, he’s tended to be on or ahead of time on things. The last bit I agree on. Tesla should do *something* to make that right.

 

[Antares Nebula]

It may be possible, but it won’t be easy. Check this thread out
Things even FSD won't do
Will FSD be able to follow orders at a police checkpoint? How about if police are directing traffic? Or if my girlfriend wants Qdoba and I want Chipotle?

Those are edge cases. If the car encounters that situation or any situation that it doesn't understand, it will stop and alert (or wake) you to take over. But even those it will eventually learn, and the steering wheel and pedals will eventually go away. Doesn't mean we won't get to FSD before then. FSD doesn't have to do every single thing that a human can do, it just needs to be statistically better than the average human in a very high (say 99%) percentage of cases.

 

[Remus]

@Remus I don't know what the time frame will be, only that it will be one of the first AI problems to be solved. I'd guess in less than five years, with a pretty good solution within two years from Tesla.

There are many "solved" AI problems already. Face id, for instance, is an AI problem.

There are agricultural robots now picking fruits using computer vision.

The list goes on. Self driving has no hope to make into the first 200.

 

[Antares Nebula]

"Tesla.com gets 13M monthly website visits versus 1M visits for The international BMW Website | BMW.com , 3M for Mercedes-Benz Luxury Cars: Sedans, SUVs, Coupes and Wagons ,10M for New Cars, Trucks, SUVs & Hybrids | Toyota Official Site (still less). Clearly future of ordering cars is Tesla and it is online! "

Ray Dargham on Twitter

 

[JollyRoger]

Sat in Cyprus McDonald's, having a coffee, and hewr two blokes discussing " Musks company's are in trouble" talking about store closures and how Volvo will be releasing a new EV this year, very poorly informed, Tesla needs to begin advertising!! And push out a message to the more common people who don't follow tech news like we do..

The lack of communication from the PR team is poor, and people's understanding of Tesla is poor, I mentioned to the wife yesterday I want to buy a model 3, she flat out refused as in her words " cars that drive them selves are dangerous I keep seeing stories on the news about people dieing because of the autopilot"...

TIME to start advertising!! That should out us over 420 ,

 

[Antares Nebula]

The stock would actually be worth $4000 a share if they released a 99% complete FSD, even if not approved by regulators. It really is that big of a deal

Will happen, maybe not this year, but it will. Tesla will be first, sometime in the next five years. I'm betting on it!