Tesla Starts Testing Grōk
The start of November has been a busy time for Tesla announcement, as CEO Elon Musk announced via a post on X.com that Tesla vehicles would be testing the use of Grok - an AI assistant software made by one of Elon’s other startups xAI - the guy really likes “X” if you hadn’t caught on to that yet.
The original find was actually made by a Tesla enthusiast named Chuck Cook, who spotted a post the Elon had liked saying that Teslas would be running with Grok as their AI assistant - and as usual, Elon poked his head into the thread quickly to confirm that, yes, if Tesla’s onboard computers could handle the program, they will be running it and using the program’s capabilities to run the most usable inference compute on Earth.
Now, what does “inference compute” mean, because that’s a bit of a mouthful. Inference in an AI context, is the process of running live data through an AI model in order to make a prediction, or solve problems, and complete tasks.
What Elon is suggesting here is that if the onboard computers of Tesla vehicles can handle the load of such a hefty program, each individual Tesla equipped with Grok should be able to aid other vehicles on the local network with live navigation and problem solving tasks.
Which is pretty cool, and it follows with what Tesla and Elon have been talking about since they debuted the new FSD direction back in March for the Investors Day presentations. Increased usage of their Dojo Supercomputer will help them train their AI models, which in turn will support each other with live data - using Grok seems to just be the next step in realising that goal.
That’s the biggest part of what Grok can bring to the Tesla network, but there are likely some quality of life things too. According to xAI, Grok is designed to be a user-friendly model, with a humorous personality based on Elon’s favourite sci-fi series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” - so you can probably expect your new onboard AI to call you a Hoopy Frood at least once.
Grok so far has been offered to Premium Plus users of X - formerly Twitter - as xAI’s first ever software release - and the company has said that the Tesla integration will likely go through X.com since Elon seems keen on making that site a whole unified system.
If the integration is successful, it looks like Elon is intending for Grok to completely take over the functions of teh current voice command system onboard Tesla vehicles, so expect testing over the next few months to really fine tune that before it starts rolling out to users.