Tesla to integrate Elon Musk’s new AI assistant in its vehicles

Tesla is going to integrate Elon Musk’s newly launched Grok AI assistant in its electric vehicles, according to the CEO.

Earlier this year, Musk launched a new AI startup, xAI, and said that it will work closely with Tesla.

The company’s mission is “to understand the true nature of the universe”, but in practice, its first project is to build a chatbot or AI assistant à la ChatGPT.

Now that the project has officially launched, we get more details about what the collaboration with Tesla is going to look like.

The chatbot is called Grōk AI. xAI describes it as follows:

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!

The company says that it is going to leverage the data coming from X, and Musk announced that it will be offered directly on the social media platform through its premium subscription service.

As for Tesla, early beta tester Brian Roemmele reported that a “smaller quantized” version of Grõk will run “native” in Tesla vehicles using the local compute power.

Musk “liked” the report and added:

Provided our vehicle AI computer is able to run the model, Tesla will probably have the most amount of true usable inference compute on Earth. Even in a robotaxi future, the cars will only be used for ~1/3 of hours/week, leaving 2/3 for distributed inference, like SETI.

Tesla has increasingly put emphasis on voice commands inside its vehicles and it would be a natural progression to have a AI assistant inside the vehicle.

Musk has previously said that “all input is an error,” as he wants Tesla vehicles to anticipate the needs of the owner and get things done as they are needed.

It now sounds like Grōk AI is now going to be part of that plan.

There’s no official timeline for the integration into Tesla vehicles, but Grōk is now becoming available in early beta to some X users. It is expected to expand from there.