ChatGPT in Tesla: Here’s what Elon Musk has to say

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has expressed his plans to advance Tesla with artificial intelligence (AI). Admitting that he might be late in jumping on the chatbot bandwagon—we might witness Tesla have its own “ChatGPT sort of moment” sometime next year. 

Elon to enter the AI market

A few weeks back, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Musk revealed that there should be a third horse in the race of AI besides OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

He also mentioned that soon, Twitter and Tesla could collaborate with an AI company—a similar partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

ChatGPT and Musk 

Musk signed an open letter in March 2023, where he asked for a pause on the development of AI systems more advanced than ChatGPT-4. He also went on to state a rather eccentric phrase, saying that AI technology already ‘stresses’ him out. 

Although, akin to his earlier decisions, he decided to take a 180-degree turn and is now behind the idea of incorporating AI in Tesla cars. 

In fact, one more decision that can prove to be quite intriguing is Musk supporting paid advertisements for his company. We’ve known Tesla to be different from its competitors in certain aspects, and marketing is one of them. 

Here’s a little background information for those unaware of the history behind Musk and OpenAI—the open-source platform that developed ChatGPT. 

Back in the early days of OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, Musk was what most people would describe as an early investor. 

He even went as far as to say that he is the reason that ChatGPT even exists in the first place, displaying the significance of his investment. 

If we go by sources, Musk reportedly invested around $50 million into the generative AI firm. This investment makes sense looking at how Musk was against OpenAI becoming a “for-profit” organisation.

AI in Tesla 

The timing for this might seem off for many considering how the electric car maker had recently paused all activity towards creating a more influential AI system than ChatGPT-4. 

Moreover, in his interactions with CNBC, Musk addressed his focus on artificial intelligence at Tesla and the future outlook of his vehicle. 

The billionaire envisioned the capacity of having millions of Tesla cars, operating autonomously—rising from three million to five million and eventually reaching 10 million. 

Musk has had a love-hate relationship with AI technology. Still, while talking to CNBC’s David Faber, Musk expressed that Telsa as a company has more potential and capabilities to create AI than popular tech competitors like Google.

He further argued that Telsa’s self-driving abilities are better than Google’s Waymo, despite getting success in a restricted geographical area. Later, he also said if his company was assigned to make an AI model similar to ChatGPT, Tesla would be the winner.

However, Musk seemed disappointed at the profit shift in OpenAI, as tech giant Microsoft invested $10 billion in this startup, affecting the leadership at OpenAI.

Nevertheless, Musk has already incorporated AI in Telsa cars to train the self-driving system to learn about various driving situations. So far, Tesla cars have one of the most advanced autonomous systems, as stated by Techradar in an article.