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

[MC3OZ]

It's not. Jordan's thesis is based upon the flimsiest logic that refining will outstrip mining, an unexamined premise only rooted to analogies to the past. Who do I trust to have more current inside information on the Lithium supply chain, Elon or Jordan? No, I think Jordan has gone over to the dark-green side, and instead of 'chasing the algorithm' on Youtube he's now 'pandering to patreons' for his income. Where else have we seen that go bad?

Jordan is just repeating information from his sources, those who are tracking mining progress, there has been a long standing disagreement between Elon and those sources.

IMO the difference is easy to explain, Elon is focused on the biggest immediate problem for Tesla, and that required Tesla to get into Lithium refining at Texas.

Tesla hasn't officially abandoned Lithium extraction from clay, and Elon might have more of an insight into how new mines are progressing, or the availability of unprocessed Lithium under contracts Tesla has signed, or is about to sign.

The only slightly annoying thing is that Jordan's sources seem determined to prove they know more about mining that Elon does. It is nothing new, they have been hammering that point for 2-3 years. Like you, I suspect if will end no better than car industry experts who thought they knew more than Elon.

I don't blame Jordan, it is a complex topic, and perhaps the so called exerts do know more than Elon.

But if I thought I knew more than Elon, I would go back and check everything 10 times, before concluding that Elon was probably right anyway even though I didn't know why he was right.

Seems like both Lithium mining and refining have good margins, I am not sure it matters which has the highest margins. I doubt that Elon ever claimed there was less money in mining, The good margins miners make may be one reason why he anticipates that mining will ramp up.

Lithium mining happens in many places, refining is concentrated in China, Jordan covered that. I will not be surprised of Elon calls out Lithium mining as an issue at some future earnings call. it all depends on what the current bottleneck is.

 

[heltok]

I think I figured out how a lot of recent developments connect. We have Ashok showing foundational models where the vision system sees the world and understands it.

You can prompt it for actions and it will predict the future. Ok, cool, but why? To make the neural network a little bit more efficient? Sure that's nice but is that all? No I think there is a bigger picture. On one of his slides it says:

• Useful as a Neural Net Simulator

Why is that important?

Think back at investor day where they demoed a human teaching the bot how to perform a task.

The human had a backpack with custom hardware and cameras on his head. Are users gonna have to buy one of those kits to show the robot what to do? What does it actually do? Basically the gear estimates a few poses for some joints and the end effectors(fingers). Maybe there's a better way of getting those poses with having all that extra hardware? How about getting it from the world model?

This is how they will do it:
Have the robot stand next to a human observing the human demonstrating the task. The robots understand the world to understand where the human is placing its fingers and from the context it understands that the human is gripping the objects. It understands what kind of object the human is manipulating, its properties and figures out if it is heavy and it can predict what will happen given different prompts.

Is it hard to learn from example? You can do it, proving that it's possible to learn to do it.

So I think what Tesla will show during AI Day 2023 is a human demoing a list of actions and the robot then performing the same actions by itself. After the observation the robot will build a world model of what just happened. Then it will simulate itself doing the same subtasks, play around with some assumptions if it's not sure about the friction, mass, rotational inertia, bending of cables etc, practice in simulation and find a good efficient strategy and generate the control sequence that it can later adapt as it executes the plan. Practice a bit in simulation, the walk up and perform the task. Not unlike how you would try to solve a task someone just showed you or how a climber is observing a route:

 

[WarpedOne]

This is how they will do it:
Have the robot stand next to a human observing the human demonstrating the task. The robots understand the world to understand where the human is placing its fingers and from the context it understands that the human is gripping the objects. It understands what kind of object the human is manipulating, its properties and figures out if it is heavy and it can predict what will happen given different prompts.

Yes, this is the way.

But it is not the endgame - the learning needs to be offloaded from the bot to the mother ship (dojo) to do the heavy processing.
This incurs time delays and prevents constant learning.

Envision a few iterations of Tesla's NN accelerator chip where it gets so scaled down that it fits into bots head, and the learning happens on the spot.
And it never stops.

Scarry?
Yes.

Inevitable?
Yes.

 

[heltok]

Yes, this is the way.

But it is not the endgame - the learning needs to be offloaded from the bot to the mother ship (dojo) to do the heavy processing.
This incurs time delays and prevents constant learning.

Envision a few iterations of Tesla's NN accelerator chip where it gets so scaled down that it fits into bots head, and the learning happens on the spot.
And it never stops.

Scarry?
Yes.

Inevitable?
Yes.

Learning to learn will be done offline with a massive dataset. Learning the sequence of a specific task can be done in the robot on a single video sequence. Later the video of what the human did and all the actions and vision of the robot doing the same task can be uploaded to the cloud to improve the world model and improve the learning skillz with the ground truth from autolabel of how heavy the object actually was, how it looked like etc, how the robot interacted with it etc. If the human says the robot misunderstood the task, that can also be uploaded to improve understanding of the tasks.

 

[15Peter20]

It is good to have undersea cables. Starling is vulnerable to a coronal ejection event. Cable are a worthwhile communications supplement. Don't put all eggs in one basket.

Give SpaceX a call.

 

[15Peter20]

Confession. My daughter got me hooked on Formula One (F1) racing. F1 started in 1950 and essentially is noisy open wheeled ICE cars traditional racing on a 4 - 5 mile track with hairpin turns and long straight aways achieving speeds of up to 225 mph (360 kmph). F1 is watched by >500 million people worldwide. Netflix has a documentary series called Drive to Survive, a behind-the-scenes look at the drivers and races of the F1 World Championship which put you into the minds of the drivers, owners and managers. The F1 World Championship runs March to December, 22 races in 22 different Countries. Two weekends ago, my home course Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal, Canada F1 race was attended by >338,000 fans. The race was won by Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, with a Honda engine. Max is currently leading ahead of S. Perez (Red Bull), F. Alonso (Assent Martin), Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) and C. Sainz Jr. (Ferrari).

In comparison, the Formula E (FE) racing series with high speed electric vehicles started in 2015. These EVs are 30 mph (55 kmph) slower than their ICE counterparts. Attendance although growing is anemic and FE has some real oddities. During the race, spectators can vote for their favourite driver, and in real time, the driver is given battery power boosts of acceleration. On some of the track corners, drivers can chose to travel further to the outside of the corner and are rewarded by taking a less optimal racing line with an additional 50kW of power acceleration boost, kind of like an arcade video. I'm not kidding. Some of the major sponsors are oil and gas companies and they have turned Formula E into somewhat of a joke.

An EV can be designed to match or have greater top speed than current F1 ICE vehicles, also EVs have much quicker acceleration (instant torque) than current F1 ICE counterparts, with their manual shifting. Typical F1 circuits with multiple hairpin turns and corners along with straight-aways, and overall race length of 190 miles, favour EVs over ICE. Wouldn't it be awesome to have ICE and EV compete together under Formula One, no compromises. The World, >500 million are currently watching. This would be equal to what Tesla has done to the drag strip. This would be the death knell for ICE, the breaking of their final straw. People need to know there is an environmentally better alternative to ICE, and having EVs consistently win Formula One will help with the transition in changing the perception of what a battery electric vehicle is capable of.

Until then, the British Grand Prix at the famed Silverstone circuit is tomorrow (Sunday). Max Verstappen has the pole position.

Unfortunately F1 is being used as a vehicle to extend the life of ICE, mainly through showcasing (Ugh) sustainable fuels.

Aramco are a major series sponsor and their aims are, essentially, to make sure they can get back to their traditional role of holding the world to ransom by choking the energy supply.

'Sustainable' synthetic oil at $350 per barrel? What's not to love?

F1 made me a pretty decent living, but it can eff off and die rather than become the tool of those scumbags.

 

[GSP]

Confession. My daughter got me hooked on Formula One (F1) racing. F1 started in 1950 and essentially is noisy open wheeled ICE cars traditional racing on a 4 - 5 mile track with hairpin turns and long straight aways achieving speeds of up to 225 mph (360 kmph). F1 is watched by >500 million people worldwide. Netflix has a documentary series called Drive to Survive, a behind-the-scenes look at the drivers and races of the F1 World Championship which put you into the minds of the drivers, owners and managers. The F1 World Championship runs March to December, 22 races in 22 different Countries. Two weekends ago, my home course Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal, Canada F1 race was attended by >338,000 fans. The race was won by Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, with a Honda engine. Max is currently leading ahead of S. Perez (Red Bull), F. Alonso (Assent Martin), Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) and C. Sainz Jr. (Ferrari).

In comparison, the Formula E (FE) racing series with high speed electric vehicles started in 2015. These EVs are 30 mph (55 kmph) slower than their ICE counterparts. Attendance although growing is anemic and FE has some real oddities. During the race, spectators can vote for their favourite driver, and in real time, the driver is given battery power boosts of acceleration. On some of the track corners, drivers can chose to travel further to the outside of the corner and are rewarded by taking a less optimal racing line with an additional 50kW of power acceleration boost, kind of like an arcade video. I'm not kidding. Some of the major sponsors are oil and gas companies and they have turned Formula E into somewhat of a joke.

An EV can be designed to match or have greater top speed than current F1 ICE vehicles, also EVs have much quicker acceleration (instant torque) than current F1 ICE counterparts, with their manual shifting. Typical F1 circuits with multiple hairpin turns and corners along with straight-aways, and overall race length of 190 miles, favour EVs over ICE. Wouldn't it be awesome to have ICE and EV compete together under Formula One, no compromises. The World, >500 million are currently watching. This would be equal to what Tesla has done to the drag strip. This would be the death knell for ICE, the breaking of their final straw. People need to know there is an environmentally better alternative to ICE, and having EVs consistently win Formula One will help with the transition in changing the perception of what a battery electric vehicle is capable of.

Until then, the British Grand Prix at the famed Silverstone circuit is tomorrow (Sunday). Max Verstappen has the pole position.

They still race horses, don't they?

I do not expect ICE race cars to ever go away completely.

Same for ICE motorcycles. Like horses, motorcycles are mostly used for racing and recreation, not daily driving.

GSP

 

[Tony73]

They still race horses, don't they?

I do not expect ICE race cars to ever go away completely.

Same for ICE motorcycles. Like horses, motorcycles are mostly used for racing and recreation, not daily driving.

GSP

Formula 1 has truly become a global sport. There are now fans outside of Europe than within. Its popularity will only increase as ICE goes away.

 

[T@oo]

They still race horses, don't they?

I do not expect ICE race cars to ever go away completely.

Same for ICE motorcycles. Like horses, motorcycles are mostly used for racing and recreation, not daily driving.

GSP

You're not dependend on an availabale infrastructure like repair shops and gas stations with horses. I expect it to be different with ICE (and living near a "weekend" motorbike racetrack" aka scenic, curvy country roads, I sincerly hope gas get's prohibitly expensive and rare to get 20 years from now).

 

[Tony73]

'Sustainable' synthetic oil at $350 per barrel? What's not to love?

Synthetic fuels have a place in our future energy mix. Like Musk said, ICE will have a very long tail. To give an idea, only 20% of the cars on the road in Norway are EVs. Oil demand growth will probably cease this decade but the decline will be very slow.

The world is slowly running out of the easy oil. Oil production to serve this tail will be increasingly environmentally disruptive and carbon intensive. Think Arctic and deep offshore drilling, Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan heavy crude. As synthetics fall in price and they will, they help to guarantee that most of that oil will not be worth producing.

 

[MarkLy]

Formula 1 has truly become a global sport. There are now fans outside of Europe than within. Its popularity will only increase as ICE goes away.

F1 has been a major global sport for decades. Now some of the US population is starting to take an interest adds to the base.

 

[Tony73]

F1 has been a major global sport for decades. Now some of the US population is starting to take an interest adds to the base.

The real growth in the last 20 years has been in Asia. China, India and the Middle East.

 

[JupiterMan]

Synthetic fuels have a place in our future energy mix. Like Musk said, ICE will have a very long tail. To give an idea, only 20% of the cars on the road in Norway are EVs. Oil demand growth will probably cease this decade but the decline will be very slow.

interesting statistic.

The ICE tail can be shortened by having trade in / scrappage schemes. In UK we have had these before to encourage environmentally unfriendly cars off the roads and not sold on to another buyer / removed form the UK "fleet".

We also see Norwegian gas stations converting over to charging stations. I would expect that over time lack of gas availability will also be a catalyst in this with range anxiety becoming associated purely with gas cars at some point. This could accelerate their demise and also reduce usage for ones that remain even if they remain statistically on the road.

So whilst the ICE tail will be long, I would not expect its reduction to be linear, there will likely be trigger points that accelerate change.

As a country ahead of the rest of the world, there will be much that we can learn form Norway's experience.

 

[lascavarian]

It may be that the great filter is how a life form deals with easy tempting use of fossil fuels and consequencial impending climate change. Has the attraction of greed and power been overcome by reasoning? Can a life form reason out when it is time to change highly profitable tools and manage it without extinction.

 

[Surfer of Life]

PSA for fellow forum members with internet connection issues.

I recently got my Starlink and set it up; for those considering likewise, there’s an excellent forum right here where you’ll see some friends you already know.

Makes perusing this forum where we live a welcome breeze! It’s things like this that build my faith in Elon’s products and services like Starlink and SpaceX that make me comfortably bullish for TSLA more than, say Tasha Keeney’s faith in FSD’s imminent success or many of the long-winded slow motion leisurely Tesla videos posted here.

 

[Bouboule]

Quick newbie question, I don't understand the Tesla graph below. From wikipedia, the top computer in the world is 1.6 ExaFlops. In 2024, Is Tesla aiming to be 100x more powerful with 100 Exa-Flops? And if you have 1/3rd of GPus in early2024, are you at 33Exaflops? It doesn't match the top 5 in the world (approx. 1Exa-flop).

 

[Optimeer]

Quick newbie question, I don't understand the Tesla graph below. From wikipedia, the top computer in the world is 1.6 ExaFlops. In 2024, Is Tesla aiming to be 100x more powerful with 100 Exa-Flops? And if you have 1/3rd of GPus in early2024, are you at 33Exaflops? It doesn't match the top 5 in the world (approx. 1Exa-flop).

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My understanding is that the Top 5 are a moving target. NVIDA’s H100 will enable building even more advanced supercomputers by other players. Today Teslas Supercomputer system is not on the list as its specifications are not public.

 

[TrendTrader007]

8 trading days including today going into ER
TSLA can go down/sideways into ER which would be better
I don’t particularly want a major pre-earnings huge run up necessarily
Interesting times ahead
As long as monthly chart stays in positive overall, I’m good

 

[Dikkie Dik]

Quick newbie question, I don't understand the Tesla graph below. From wikipedia, the top computer in the world is 1.6 ExaFlops. In 2024, Is Tesla aiming to be 100x more powerful with 100 Exa-Flops? And if you have 1/3rd of GPus in early2024, are you at 33Exaflops? It doesn't match the top 5 in the world (approx. 1Exa-flop).

View attachment 954912
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It’s the compute DOJO will reach measured in equivalent GPU’s. That’s how I understand it.

 

[AMN]

8 trading days including today going into ER
TSLA can go down/sideways into ER which would be better
I don’t particularly want a major pre-earnings huge run up necessarily
Interesting times ahead
As long as monthly chart stays in positive overall, I’m good

I generally like your content but this ^^ kind of stuff is just packing foam. No?