Tesla to Deploy Local Compute Power for Scaled-Down Version of xAI's Grōk

Key Points

🚗 Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, hinted that Tesla vehicles might natively run a smaller version of the AI assistant Grōk, developed by xAI.
💬 The specific applications of Grōk within Tesla are unclear, but it could potentially be used in place of the company’s current voice command system.
🌐 xAI is planning to create an application programming interface (API) for Grōk, and the model is expected to have audio and image recognition capabilities.
💰 Grōk will be provided to xAI users who subscribe to the Premium Plus tier, starting at $16 a month.
📅 The release date for Grōk to X Premium Plus users is yet to be confirmed, but Musk mentioned that subscribers would get access to the software “as soon as it’s out of early beta.”
🌐 xAI is actively hiring for various positions, including AI engineering, data engineering, web engineering, and infrastructure engineering.

The first product from Elon Musk-led xAI was announced on Friday, and the CEO has suggested that Tesla’s vehicles may natively run a smaller version of the AI assistant.

On Saturday, X user and Tesla enthusiast Chuck Cook spotted that Musk liked a post saying that a smaller, quantized version of the AI model Grōk would run natively on Tesla with local computing power. Following Cook’s mention, Musk noted that Teslas will likely come with the largest amount of usable inference compute in the world — as long as the vehicles’ AI computer can run the Grōk model.

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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2023

Exactly what applications Grōk will have on Tesla are unclear, but some have noted that it could be used in place of the company’s current voice command system. The post that Musk liked mentioned this and that the SuperPrompt context window in Grok may have a limit of 25,000 characters, adding that the model will first look to X for live content access.

Additionally, xAI is reportedly planning an application programming interface (API) for Grōk, and the model is also expected to have both audio and image recognition.

The news comes after Musk announced that Grōk will be provided to X users who subscribe to the company’s Premium Plus tier, starting at $16 a month. It also comes just a few months after Musk launched the OpenAI competitor xAI, officially marking the company’s first software release.

While it isn’t yet clear when xAI plans to release the model to X Premium Plus users, Musk said on Friday that subscribers would get access to the software “as soon as it’s out of early beta.”

The company’s jobs web page also hosts four different job listings for working at the company: AI engineering and researching, data engineering and web crawling, full stack web engineering, and infrastructure engineering.

In August, the xAI account on X posted that it was hiring creators, teachers and curators to help improve the company’s models, adding that those who are extremely good at writing and are experts in their fields should direct message (DM) the account.