Elon Musk says Tesla cars now have a mind, figured out ‘some aspects of AGI’

Elon Musk claims that Tesla may have “figured out some aspects of AGI” as he believes that Tesla vehicles now have “a mind.”

The CEO has said several times that he believes most of Tesla’s value is attached to self-driving, ad he says Tesla could achieve it by the end of the year.

The Tesla community is divided between believers who think the automaker is indeed about to deliver on its long-stated promise, and people who have been burned too many times by missed timelines and think a robotaxi service from Tesla is still years away.

That’s why we are tracking the effort really closely and see if there’s any chance Tesla can make Musk’s prediction true with just a few months left in the year.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk often shines a spotlight on some of those true believers who only show the good performance of Tesla’s FSD Beta. This week, he commented on one of those by claiming that he believes Tesla “have figured out some aspects of AGI”:

I think we may have figured out some aspects of AGI. The car has a mind. Not an enormous mind, but a mind nonetheless.

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. Musk has said that he believes Tesla might play a role in achieving AGI through its self-driving program.

Unlike some other self-driving programs, Tesla relies heavily on camera-based vision and neural nets to power its system. The company believes that this approach is closer to how human drives and could be transferred to other autonomous products, like its Optimus robot.

Electrek’s Take

The guy may not be wrong. In my last review of FSD Beta, I noted that it drives like a first-time 14-year-old driver who sometimes does hard drugs.

I also noted that while this might sound like an insult to Tesla’s system, I wouldn’t know the first thing about making a car drive autonomously at the level of a 14-year-old driver who sometimes does hard drugs. Therefore, I believe it’s an achievement in itself.

Now does it mean that Tesla cars have a mind equivalent to a 14-year-old who sometimes does hard drugs while driving? Probably not, but I can see his point.

If you have been following my reporting on FSD, you know that I’m not the most optimistic about the program. However, I have some hope that updating the vehicle control with new neural nets and the new computing power that comes with the Dojo supercomputer could greatly accelerate the pace of improvements.

AGI, though? I’m skeptical but open-minded.