Tesla, the leading electric vehicle and clean energy company, has recently showcased its impressive capabilities in generating realistic videos from real-world data. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, claimed that Tesla’s simulation and video generation are the “best in the world” and that they are essential for achieving full self-driving.
Tesla’s generative video from last year
Musk shared a video from last year, featuring Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy, explaining the foundational models for autonomy at Tesla. The video was not a recorded footage, but a dynamically generated one, using the data collected from Tesla’s fleet of vehicles. The video demonstrated Tesla’s ability to create accurate and realistic scenes, objects, and physics, as well as to synthesize natural speech and lip movements.
The video was a remarkable example of how Tesla uses artificial intelligence to advance its vision of autonomous driving. Musk said that Tesla’s video generation exceeds OpenAI, a prominent AI research lab, in predicting extremely accurate physics, which is crucial for self-driving.
OpenAI’s Sora, a text-to-video generative model
OpenAI, a non-profit organization co-founded by Musk, recently announced Sora, a text-to-video generative model that can create videos of up to a minute long, simply by typing in a text prompt. Sora, named after the Japanese word for sky, denoting limitless creative potential, was trained on publicly available videos, but the dataset has not been released yet.
Sora has generated some impressive and diverse videos, such as a dancing robot, a flying dragon, and a talking cat. However, some of the videos also showed artifacts, glitches, and inconsistencies, indicating the limitations and challenges of the model. OpenAI has released Sora to a small “Red Team” that would perform adversarial testing on the model, to identify and mitigate potential harms and abuses.
Musk’s criticism of OpenAI and its CEO
Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, since he left the board of the organization in 2018. He accused OpenAI of deviating from its original mission of creating and ensuring the safe and beneficial use of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is the hypothetical intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that humans can. He also criticized OpenAI for partnering with Microsoft, which he views as a competitor to Tesla.
Musk shared his tweets from 2016, announcing Nvidia’s donation of its first DGX-1 AI computer to OpenAI, and showing the original reason for creating OpenAI, which was a quote by Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He expressed his disappointment and regret over the current state of OpenAI, saying “And now look what’s happened.”
Musk’s ambition to make video games with Tesla’s AI
Musk, who is an avid gamer himself, also revealed his ambition to make video games with Tesla’s AI. He said that he has wanted to do that for a long time, but that it can only happen after Tesla releases unsupervised full self-driving, which is far safer than supervised full self-driving. Supervised and unsupervised learning are branches of machine learning, in which the former learns from labeled data, while the latter learns from finding patterns in unlabeled data.
Musk did not give any details or timeline for Tesla’s unsupervised full self-driving, which is one of the most challenging and elusive goals in AI. However, he hinted that it would be a game-changer for Tesla and the world, as well as a potential source of inspiration and entertainment for video game enthusiasts.
