Nvidia star founder Jensen Huang has backed Tesla’s strategy for artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous vehicles weeks before a key vote that will determine whether CEO Elon Musk gets his record-breaking compensation.
Musk is all but betting on the company with his recent move toward artificial intelligence, quietly upending his vision of increasing sales more than tenfold to 20 million vehicles a year by 2030—the same as what Toyota and Volkswagen will sell combined.
“Tesla is far ahead in the field of self-driving cars,” Huang confirmed in an interview with the publication. Yahoo Finance loaded on YouTube late last week.
The AI pivot is controversial because it moves Tesla away from its stated mission of accelerating the global transition to sustainable transportation. And while Musk’s so-called “supervised full self-driving” may be the best-known advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) on the market, few customers have realized the value of shelling out $15,000 for a system that will require them to keep an eye on their car . as he tries to navigate the city streets.
As a result, Musk was forced to lower the price again to $8,000, the level it was when he first launched the FSD beta in October 2020.
High quality approval
Support from people like Juan, whose draw in developer conference now filling entire stadiums may go a long way to allay investors’ fears that he himself might have veered off course.
“The technology is truly revolutionary and the work they are doing is incredible,” the Nvidia CEO continued.
What kind of rock concert is this? No, this is Jensen Huang’s report on@nvidia‘s #GTC24. Wow, what a difference a few years makes! pic.twitter.com/RqsiOg6Q2D
— Bob O’Donnell (@bobodtech) March 18, 2024
In a couple of weeks, shareholders are set to vote for a second time on Musk’s record pay package – worth roughly $55 billion at the current share price – after a Delaware court in January invalidated the original 2018 vote for procedural reasons related to the quality of Tesla’s pay. . control.
With trusted advisers such as Glass Lewis now recommending investors vote against approving Musk’s salary, the results of the June 13 annual meeting were harsher than expected.
A vote of confidence in his new AI strategy from someone like Huang could boost his chances. Few businessmen are as revered as Huang, who founded Nvidia and driven its exponential growth in recent years with a visionary bet on repurposing GPUs to train artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4o.
Musk and Tesla are gobbling up Nvidia AI chips at a record pace
Huang praised the twelfth and latest version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, which abandoned the previous approach of hard-coding commands in a computer language in favor of using a purely artificial intelligence-enabled neural network.
“He learns by watching videos,” Huang said. “This technology is very similar to the technology of large language models, but it simply requires a huge training base, and the reason for this is that the video transmission speed, the amount of data is such, So high.”
However, Huang also knows how important Tesla is as a customer. Musk is a voracious buyer of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence training chips, having more than doubled its computing power in just First quarter for the last three months of last year.
During this period, Tesla has spent a staggering $1 billion building out its artificial intelligence infrastructure, and that’s just the beginning. Tesla predicts its computing capacity, equivalent to 35,000 GPU clusters, will reach 85,000 by the end of the year, at which point the company may have spent $10 billion.
To afford such investments at a time when his core auto business must continue to offer profit-cutting incentives to prevent sales from plummeting, Musk is willing to go to virtually any length to cut costs elsewhere.
It has already laid off thousands of employees, fired the team behind its industry-leading Supercharger network, and abandoned plans to invest in entirely new assembly lines for its upcoming $25,000 entry-level model, now widely expected to be the Model 3 hatchback .
But if it helps Tesla maintain its lead in the electric vehicle industry while making Musk $55 billion richer, those sacrifices may not be in vain.