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

[ZeApelido]

GM Ultimatum Batteries

"Don't you dare try to charge your car, or else..."

 

[Carl Raymond]

For any one who thinks it's less than super difficult, try any simple task (button your shirt, write your name, take a credit card from your pocket and insert it into a card reader) and try to do this with completely numb hands.

That was my first thought too, will it need touch sensitive skin? If it does, how long before it wears out? Human self repairing skin, sensitive to pressure, temperature, texture and puncture is under appreciated.

Without it, any robot will be a stumbling tool and dish dropping klutz.

 

[Zero CO2]

I'm fairly sure it was Grimes.

i am fairly sure the last Tesla marketing person was given their walking papers after the dancing bot

 

[MC3OZ]

and we get to see very accelerated robot evolution (remember a few SF stories about that”

At least for a long time they are not going to be sentient beings, that learn independently.
Improvements will a software upgrade with an imbedded NN.

On the factory floor the task description will be more like, "when part A stops at your station, pick up part B from the bin and join it to part A"...
The production line needs to keep moving at a constant speed, that limits the ability of Robots to make independent decisions..
(Unless they abandon the concept of a production line.)

 

[jhm]

See the post just above yours. Yes it would show up as a balance sheet asset, though likely buried in property plant and equipment, and relative to the cost of their factories, it will be a rounding error.

Thanks, the post above prompted the question. I'm not sure $1.2M of silicon covers the full cost of Dojo.

 

[22522]

That was my first thought too, will it need touch sensitive skin? If it does, how long before it wears out? Human self repairing skin, sensitive to pressure, temperature, texture and puncture is under appreciated.

Without it, any robot will be a stumbling tool and dish dropping klutz.

Respectfully suggest that maybe there are other ways. Definitely need coefficient of friction but a strain gage on a few of the many bones can tell you how much force is applied. In other words, the bones might aggregate the information in a way that is easy to integrate and tie back to specific motor control. Each bone is a flexible beam that provides a similar accommodation to skin.

 

[MC3OZ]

That was my first thought too, will it need touch sensitive skin? If it does, how long before it wears out? Human self repairing skin, sensitive to pressure, temperature, texture and puncture is under appreciated.

Without it, any robot will be a stumbling tool and dish dropping klutz.

I think we can interpret this as:-

1. The hands may be an expensive part that may need to be replaced/repaired at frequent intervals.
2. Robot tasks may be limited to those the current version of the hands can support

The physical design of the robot is a separate learning curve to the software, both areas should improve overtime.. which means the robot can progressively do more and more useful things.

 

[hacer]

...

How hard is chip manufacturing really?

Intel recently waved the white flag of surrender to TSMC after over 50 years in the business. That is to say that the leading edge of chip manufacturing is pretty darn hard.

 

[Thekiwi]

No demand? For Tesla Model Y delivery is now January (From December yesterday or a couple days ago)
Or for the TSLAQ production problems LOL


View attachment 699288

You can still get a performance model Y this quarter (delivers September), so there is a little bit of product prioritization going on here with Tesla steering people to the higher cost option if they want a car. Same situation with the 3.

 

[Thekiwi]

Intel recently waved the white flag of surrender to TSMC after over 50 years in the business. That is to say that the leading edge of chip manufacturing is pretty darn hard.

They did? I thought they did the opposite with announcing they were getting into direct competition with TSMC by offering to be contract manufacturers with Intel fabs

 

[hacer]

Did he say that Ford has great COBOL software engineers?

That's a sure tell tale that they can't do serious technology/scientific software. Everybody knows that stuff is written in FORTRAN. /s

Edit: @capster beat me to it. I'm always behind on this forum

 

[geometro]

I wish they had shown the robot next year… after the CT, semi, Roadster and 4680s were rolling out of Austin and Berlin.
The FSD and dojo stuff should have been enough for recruiting. The robot seems like a bit of distraction.

 

[Singuy]

They did? I thought they did the opposite with announcing they were getting into direct competition with TSMC by offering to be contract manufacturers with Intel fabs

Intel's process node is now behind TSMC by a few years. In fact Intel is commissioning TSMC for some 5nm chips in 2023, that's how behind they are. Intel have announced that they will be offering contracts because

1. The government is giving out aid for building up the infrastructure
2. Need to keep their fab running as their own processors become less desirable as they continue to lose marketshare in the datacenter to AMD/ARM/ASIC.

 

[Wicket]

Well, thanks. I have little to no decades of productive time left, so I applaud your potential willingness to leave your wilderness before it burns. I hope you do that.
Were I a few decades younger I would have been eager to rekindle the excitement of early PayPal days.

Tesla today is cash flow positive while heading on to more headlong growth. Can anybody name another industrial that has achieved that? I cannot.
Tesla has dabbled in various financial topics, including deposits on various products including FSD and vehicle orders.
A small dose of history is relevant: The Bank of the Mahattan Company was formed in 1799 to furnish water to New York City. The mandate included taking deposits. The deposits worked, the water did not do so well. That morphed into today's JP MorganChase, one of whose antecedents taught me banking, sent me to Iran, Lebanon, the UAE and Bahrain to start banks, to Japan and elsewhere to acquire ones, so I admit a slight historical link, myself.

As Tesla expands to wholesale and retail energy supply (licenses already issued UK, EU)deposits and financing are inevitable, as is solar equipment rental, also existing. The already existing vestigial insurance business can yield more cash surpluses.

Auto leasing already exists in several markets and is poised for pay-for-use models in various guises.

Thus I suggest Tesla is already advancing along lines Elon Musk has long since considered. Was it not PayPal that yielded his own capital base?

I do not pretend that I can predict what Tesla will do with all that. Without question Mr. Musk is acutely aware of the opportunities and pitfalls in such endeavors.
As more countries are served by Tesla, more Tesla Energy expands, more fleet operations of various kinds develop, we can be assured that Tesla will b more like a bank, formally called that or not. Once investment grade arrives the Tesla cost of capital and financing opportunities will ascend rapidly.

From cryptocurrencies to an array of risk management services Tesla could indeed morph.

Consider these:
Toyota began with automatic looms,
Hyundai (in English 'Modern Times') began as a contractor to rebuild Korea after WWII,
Both became keiretsu/chaebol leads through, in part their financial acumen.
These and several others were created with a large financial services core that tends to be externally almost invisible.

Many examples exist. Tesla will probably follow principles similar to those two, who almost never discuss their financial core activities.

Tesla will almost certainly discuss little of these topics, wisely because that will tend to draw much more criticism than praise.

Not that I know if or how this piece might fit but I recalled this recent BoD addition: Hiromichi Mizuno - Wikipedia

 

[hacer]

They did? I thought they did the opposite with announcing they were getting into direct competition with TSMC by offering to be contract manufacturers with Intel fabs

Yes, Intel wants to offer contract fab on their outdated feature sizes because try as they might they haven't been able to get to the next generation feature size in mass production by TSMC for quite a while now. If Intel intends to continue designing and selling leading edge CPUs they have no choice but to have someone else fab it for them. It's very likely that TSMC will be mass producing 3nm chips before Intel is able to make 7nm chips.

Market watch story on Intel's failure to keep up.

 

[rk20]

Other guy: simulation will be good for Optimus
Elon: uh… Optimus is the robot
Other guy: oops
Elon: Optimus… as in Prime

I knew Optimus Prime (hehe ... from the movies) and you Tesla (House) Bot are no Optimus Prime

 

[Artful Dodger]

That was my first thought too, will it need touch sensitive skin? If it does, how long before it wears out? Human self repairing skin, sensitive to pressure, temperature, texture and puncture is under appreciated.

Without it, any robot will be a stumbling tool and dish dropping klutz.

Luckily, Tesla can already use data from Neuralink implants to train the neural net for sense of touch. It gives the hardware team a benchmark for target performance and sensitivity, while allowing the software team to compare performance.

Cheers!

 

[2daMoon]

Ok, caught up. Whew, that took a while.

I had a thought about the part of Tesla that will be the source of the apps for Robot.

Taking into consideration how this group will have a goal to make Robot have behaviors that would endear it to folks.

What I'm getting at here is the name of the group, and maybe an app as well.

It seems obvious the app will be called Virtual People Personality, and the group could spin off from Tesla and be called the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Except, their Robot can make tea.

 

[dww12]

I think we can interpret this as:-

1. The hands may be an expensive part that may need to be replaced/repaired at frequent intervals.
2. Robot tasks may be limited to those the current version of the hands can support

The physical design of the robot is a separate learning curve to the software, both areas should improve overtime.. which means the robot can progressively do more and more useful things.

If prosthetics don’t need it, the bot won’t.

 

[SunCatcher]

Once Upon a Time: GM had a vision of the future. We're still waiting.

GM Headquarters reception 1965...