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

[Krugerrand]

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[Krugerrand]

Interesting data point. My kid's daycare owner just got a Lucid which he ordered 6 months ago, said it would be delivered in 60 days but took 6 months. He also had a Model X refresh on order and just got the notice that it's ready after 1.5 years. He of course is cancelling the model X because he got his Lucid.

I was blown away that Tesla made like 20x more Model X in the last 1.5 years than Lucid but still lost out on delivering it in time vs a Luvid. I was also surprised that the initial promise time for a Lucid was lower than any car from Tesla 6 months ago (when electric cars were at peak demand).

He’ll be sorry.

 

[scaesare]

the men in suits was low bar

Immediately after Elon announced Optimus, these guys put together/demoed an actual robot - (but we don't know if there was a man behind the curtain controlling his every move or he was full AI - if full AI, I would be impressed as they have some software as well as hardware (actuators etc ..). cheers!!

"Men in suits"... Plural?

Are you talking the original AI day? Wasn't that just 1 person, and thought to be female (Grimes)?

In any case, clearly Tesla wasn't trying to pass that off as being a real robot. That demo video clearly was a demo of their robot capability. Which wasn't much, IMO.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

It's difficult for this negative traction to take hold when the backdrop is a healthy US economy, dramatically shrinking comodity costs, and the major downward pressure is purely the spectre of someone being "too responsible" at the top of the money pile.

 

[thx1139]

I still dont see how a recession is coming when we have such a shortage of labor.

Yesterday after Bears game we stopped where my youngest son was parked so they had a quicker drive back to Indiana University. Upscale outdoor mall. Wanted to get Starbucks Frappucino's. The mall had a little festival going on as well. Starbucks closed at 1PM because of staff shortage. Our Starbucks in Lemont last week had limited hours Tuesday through Saturday. The Popeye's chicken next town over only is open for drive thru because of staff shortage.

My middle son was a teachers aide last spring in Austin while he has been going through a software engineering bootcamp. This fall the Austin school district made him a 5th grade teacher. The principal knows that he could get a job offer any minute, but she had no choice. The school district is way understaffed and week after week they have COVID outbreaks that reduce teaching staff. Two weeks ago my son had 40 students in his class because teachers out with COVID. He doesnt have a teachers certificate, his bachelors degree is a double major of Political Theory and Arabic. He was supposed to go into Peace Corp, but pandemic killed that. My daughter in-law is a counselor at the school and she is getting called in to sub classes because of shortage.

 

[Nocturnal]

I still dont see how a recession is coming when we have such a shortage of labor.

The only way it's coming is if the FED fumbles the ball and creates one. I've increased my odds of that lately.

 

[traxila]

I still dont see how a recession is coming when we have such a shortage of labor.

Yesterday after Bears game we stopped where my youngest son was parked so they had a quicker drive back to Indiana University. Upscale outdoor mall. Wanted to get Starbucks Frappucino's. The mall had a little festival going on as well. Starbucks closed at 1PM because of staff shortage. Our Starbucks in Lemont last week had limited hours Tuesday through Saturday. The Popeye's chicken next town over only is open for drive thru because of staff shortage.

My middle son was a teachers aide last spring in Austin while he has been going through a software engineering bootcamp. This fall the Austin school district made him a 5th grade teacher. The principal knows that he could get a job offer any minute, but she had no choice. The school district is way understaffed and week after week they have COVID outbreaks that reduce teaching staff. Two weeks ago my son had 40 students in his class because teachers out with COVID. He doesnt have a teachers certificate, his bachelors degree is a double major of Political Theory and Arabic. He was supposed to go into Peace Corp, but pandemic killed that. My daughter in-law is a counselor at the school and she is getting called in to sub classes because of shortage.

This is the biggest problem right now. The FED has gone on record that it will crush wage inflation. It is willing to create pain for this to happen. Yet the labor market is crazy strong. So the only way to really crush wage inflation is to break the back of the labor market with stupidly aggressive interest hikes to plunge to economy into a bad recession.

WS sees this now and is prepared to price in nasty stuff reminiscent of 2008. And it does not have to get 2008 bad for another 25% market haircut anyway.

US FED is always reacting. Now they are leaning the most on data that is lagging, like the CPI indicators, and they are all data nerds. Why would they do this? Almost makes you think they have an agenda...

 

[UncaNed]

This is the biggest problem right now. The FED has gone on record that it will crush wage inflation. It is willing to create pain for this to happen. Yet the labor market is crazy strong. So the only way to really crush wage inflation is to break the back of the labor market with stupidly aggressive interest hikes to plunge to economy into a bad recession.

WS sees this now and is prepared to price in nasty stuff reminiscent of 2008. And it does not have to get 2008 bad for another 25% market haircut anyway.

US FED is always reacting. Now they are leaning the most on data that is lagging, like the CPI indicators, and they are all data nerds. Why would they do this? Almost makes you think they have an agenda...

I don't get this - wages aren't really that high in the grand scheme of things are they? If anything, I'd think we want to encourage lower-income pay to go up so we don't have working folks living in tents because of unaffordable housing, but throttle inflation elsewhere somehow.

 

[wtlloyd]

Interesting data point. My kid's daycare owner just got a Lucid which he ordered 6 months ago, said it would be delivered in 60 days but took 6 months. He also had a Model X refresh on order and just got the notice that it's ready after 1.5 years. He of course is cancelling the model X because he got his Lucid.

I was blown away that Tesla made like 20x more Model X in the last 1.5 years than Lucid but still lost out on delivering it in time vs a Luvid. I was also surprised that the initial promise time for a Lucid was lower than any car from Tesla 6 months ago (when electric cars were at peak demand).

Pretty sure I don't want to know what you pay for daycare. You have my sympathy!

 

[Cosmacelf]

As a former certified Fanuc system integrator, I can tell you that other manufacturers, also have custom firmware/hardware for their robots (Toyota, VW,...) to have a better integration into their factory automation. I don't think Tesla buys the hardware and completely rewrote the software from scratch. Maybe communication protocols, tool integration, loading models for path planning,...etc could all be Tesla's own.
Industrial robots are programmed to execute motion paths with their TCP and do not have any neural nets on board for their motion. 4D points are executed, translated into movements for each axis to reach a certain destination within a time, position tolerance. (Some machine learning is already used in industrical automation: for eg. vision applications for pick & place scenario's, use neural nets to find stuff, send the coordinates to the robot to pick it up)

The Honda Asimo bot could walk because of many algorithms, set of rules and logic, defining every scenario based on sensor data, to control motors to show a walking robot. Everything defined. Similar to industrial robots.

Tesla bot movements, interactions, ... will rely heavily on a framework using neural nets. Based on a lot of training data, a model could be achieved that exponentially increases the Teslabot possibilities for walking, jogging, overcome obstacles, grabbing stuff, ... very rapidly.

Do you happen to know how Boston Dynamics does their movement? Algos or neural nets?

 

[Discoducky]

Do you happen to know how Boston Dynamics does their movement? Algos or neural nets?

Hand crafted algo's, no AI that I know of. It is all pre-programmed for one particular set of actions in a static environment.

 

[Singuy]

Pretty sure I don't want to know what you pay for daycare. You have my sympathy!

Yeah they own multiple Goddard school. His house is worth 3.5 mil and I'm pretty sure he could care less if his Lucid becomes a paperweight .

 

[Featsbeyond50]

The only way it's coming is if the FED fumbles the ball and creates one. I've increased my odds of that lately.

I think you're watching the game on tape delay.

 

[Nocturnal]

I don't get this - wages aren't really that high in the grand scheme of things are they? If anything, I'd think we want to encourage lower-income pay to go up so we don't have working folks living in tents because of unaffordable housing, but throttle inflation elsewhere somehow.

It's about the amount of slack in the labor market IMO. If we get under the normal rate of inflation then wages are constantly squeezed upwards. It's easy for a company to cut prices and take a bite out of inflation that way, but it's very hard to give people pay cuts. Sticky wage theory.

I think you're watching the game on tape delay.

I'm still leaning towards "no recession" but not by as much as I was last month. Fingers crossed!

 

[Cosmacelf]

Hand crafted algo's, no AI that I know of. It is all pre-programmed for one particular set of actions in a static environment.

I am suddenly unimpressed.

 

[MartinAustin]

Sorry to break in and talk about TSLA nice to see some 3% relief after that brutal prior week of macro pain. TSLA is still stuck in a range it first entered in July. Hopefully next week we will emerge out of that range.

I realised no-one will be attributing any TSLA climbing next week to AI Day 2022. If there is any climbing... it will be attributed to the Q3 delivery numbers, which IMO is a much bigger deal. Lots of Tesla news next Monday

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I don't get this - wages aren't really that high in the grand scheme of things are they? If anything, I'd think we want to encourage lower-income pay to go up so we don't have working folks living in tents because of unaffordable housing, but throttle inflation elsewhere somehow.

It's good for the top 25% or so, but for everyone else this amount of inflation risks driving our wealth and income inequality further into record territory. I think we can all agree that would be net negative.

I wasn't in the hawkish camp going into this Fed meeting, but this global market reaction is so beautiful I'm now a believer. We needed to push out of stimulative and past neutral on Fed funds, now we have and the world has taken notice.

So long as they realize the magnitude of what's already been done, we should be fine. GDP growth may take a hit into technical recession, but it sure looks to me like this "plan to raise unemployment to 4.4%" is just talk.

We can get into a mild recession and keep this job market. Hell, we're likely already halfway thru it.

The Fed needed to regain the respect of the markets and it has. Let's see how the Sep CPI looks, then we can transition to .25 hikes and pauses.

 

[Discoducky]

I am suddenly unimpressed.

Exactly. And have you heard how loud these things are when turned on? I'm hoping they've improved it since then.

My goodness, I'm guessing it is a super loud active cooling fan for the motors, battery and inverter plus the sounds of the actuators firing.

That's why they set it to music

 

[ZachF]

It's difficult for this negative traction to take hold when the backdrop is a healthy US economy, dramatically shrinking comodity costs, and the major downward pressure is purely the spectre of someone being "too responsible" at the top of the money pile.

This is a bit of a US centric take … yeah North America is sitting pretty but Europe is staring at a large recession led by energy intensive manufacturing, China is unwinding the largest property bubble in the history of human civilization, and Japan looks like it’s headed towards national bankruptcy. Just those three places alone are almost half the global economy.

 

[AndrewZ]

Hand crafted algo's, no AI that I know of. It is all pre-programmed for one particular set of actions in a static environment.

Looks like Boston Dynamics has spent most of their time to date focused on what they're calling "Athletic AI", which is all about human-like movement patterns necessarily for balancing, traversing environments, etc. Like the old videos they put out of Spot and the bipedal robots self-correcting when being pushed around, slipping on ice, and stuff like that. And that's what allows their robots to do the crazy dance routines and such.

They had also recently set up an AI Institute to expand into other areas -- I didn't know this but apparently they're 80% owned by Hyundai