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NVIDIA says Tesla raised the bar for self-driving tech, car makers must deliver

Tesla's Full Self-Driving computer. | Image: Tesla

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NVIDIA, a prominent and highly successful leader in computer chip design, says that Tesla has raised the bar in autonomous driving software, and other car makers will have to deliver similar performance if they want to compete in the long-term future of the auto industry, according to a recent NVIDIA company blog.

“It’s financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,” CEO Elon Musk stated during the company’s Autonomy Day event. He then compared the purchase of any other car as equivalent to buying a horse for one’s transportation purposes. NVIDIA, for its part, agrees with Musk and Tesla’s sentiments about the future of self-driving and the need for powerful computers to push its progress.

“Self-driving cars—which are key to new levels of safety, efficiency, and convenience—are the future of the industry. And they require massive amounts of computing performance… This is the way forward. Every other automaker will need to deliver this level of performance,” the chip maker wrote.

The type of autonomous driving technology Tesla is pushing is predicted to be the inevitable standard, and the company’s lead in the arena will likely increase even further as more of their vehicles take to the road. “By end of this quarter, about half a million Teslas will have full self-driving hardware (pending computer swap) & we will make another half million FSD cars by mid next year,” Musk tweeted, emphasizing this point and echoing what he’d explained the day prior.

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Tesla’s recent Autonomy Day presentation drew comparisons between the all-electric car maker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer chip and those produced by NVIDIA, the only computer processing unit maker delivering performance in line with Tesla’s. NVIDIA currently has two self-driving chips in the works: the Xavier SoC (system on a chip) for assisted driving AutoPilot features, and the DRIVE AGX Pegasus computer for full self-driving. The comparisons in Tesla’s presentation were directed at the Xavier in a single-chip configuration.

The technical performance specifications required to run powerful artificial intelligence (AI) neural networks (NN) for autonomous driving require operations performed per second to be measured in the trillions – abbreviated as TOPS (tera operations per second). Tesla’s FSD computer chip can perform at a rate of 72 TOPS (x2 chips in the computer for 144 TOPS total), and the Xavier does 30 TOPS (mistakenly claimed to be 21 TOPS at Tesla’s event, per NVIDIA’s blog).

NVIDIA also expressed in the blog piece its opinion that the match between FSD and Xavier wasn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, given the purposes of the two chips. The chip designer prefers its DRIVE AGX Pegasus for the line-up, a computer intended for fully autonomous driving and capable of 320 TOPS. Tesla is assumingly aware of this product and obviously acknowledges the high level of technology developed by NVIDIA given that Hardware 2.5, the computer currently running Tesla’s Autopilot features, was made by the company.

A Tesla with driver features “deleted” under the Tesla Network. | Image: Tesla

There are additional specifications such as power consumption that further differentiate FSD from NVIDIA’s products with a more similar purpose to Tesla’s latest computer. Thus, a different product match may not have mattered towards the overall point being made in the presentation. Either way, a more important distinction between the two companies is the current status of their technologies.

Tesla’s chip was crowned as “objectively the best in the world” by Musk, and this looks to be true, given the fact that all Tesla Model S, 3, and X vehicles being produced now have the hardware installed and will add to the already accruing real world self-driving data the company’s cars provide. NVIDIA has partnered with other car manufacturers to develop its products, but they are not incorporated in production vehicles the way Tesla’s FSD has been yet.

The performance Tesla has achieved in its FSD computer is impressive, and that was and continues to be the point. “[Autonomy] is basically our entire expense structure,” Musk told an investor inquiring about where the California-based company was incurring the most cost. Tesla is hedging its fiscal future on the success of autonomous driving in the marketplace, and the company is doing so with bullish energy driven by its famous top executive.

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Musk expects Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to be complete by the end of this year and fully operational by the second quarter of next year.

Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

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Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

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Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

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Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

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The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.

Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.

Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.

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The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.

A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.

Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.

Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.

Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.

The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.

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Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.

The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.

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