Elon Musk refuted a story claiming that his artificial intelligence business, xAI, had discussions about receiving a cut of future sales from Tesla (TSLA.O) in exchange for providing xAI’s resources and technology to Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturer.
The Wall Street Journal revealed on Saturday that, in accordance with the proposed arrangement as outlined to investors, Tesla would license xAI’s artificial intelligence models to help power its driver-assistance software and fully autonomous technology and share some of that money with the startup.
Musk stated late on Saturday on his social media platform X, “There is no need to license anything from xAI, but Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI that have helped accelerate achieving unsupervised FSD,” and he added that the report was “not accurate.”
According to the Journal, which cited anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, xAI will help Tesla build additional capabilities, such as software for its humanoid robot Optimus and a voice assistant for its electric vehicles.
The report stated that xAI officials had talked about an equitable income split from Tesla’s FSD and that the parameters of any revenue-sharing arrangement between xAI and Tesla would depend in part on how much Tesla depended on xAI’s technology as opposed to its own.
To take on OpenAI, which is supported by Microsoft, Musk introduced xAI last year. It raised questions about whether he would give the AI startup access to some of the automaker’s resources.
Speaking about the “helpful advancing full self-driving and in building up the new Tesla data centre,” he stated that xAI’s chatbot, Grok, could be integrated with Tesla’s software.
The billionaire CEO stated in July that he would talk about a $5 billion investment in xAI with the Tesla board.
