Connect with us
tesla-ai-day-2022 tesla-ai-day-2022

News

Tesla AI Day News Roundup: Optimus, FSD Beta & Dojo updates

Published

on

Tesla AI Day has officially kicked off. Guests have started entering the venue already.

AI Day is an event mainly held to recruit talented people and welcome them to Tesla. However, it is still a Tesla event, so everyone expects some product surprises and updates, specifically about the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus, Dojo, and Full Self-Driving.

Teslarati will be closely following the event. This is our news roundup for 2022 AI Day, covering key information Tesla reveals at the event.

Photos and Videos aren’t allowed during the event from attendees. However, guests were able to capture some cool photos of a Tesla Semi with Cybertruck graffiti, a literal fork on the road, and some other cool set ups around the premises.

Tesla’s former AI Head, Andrej Karpathy, has brought out the (metaphorical) popcorn. His brief “comment” hints that AI Day 2022 might be as exciting as everyone anticipates.

Elon Musk set some expectations about Optimus, reminding everyone that during AI Day 2021, Tesla’s humanoid bot was just “a guy in a robot suit.” Musk also laid out the topics for AI Day 2022, saying that Tesla will talk about Autopilot and Dojo, too.

Optimus Takes the Stage

Tesla didn’t waste any time and brought out Optimus immediately. According to a Tesla mechanical engineer, AI Day 2022 is the first time Optimus has been “let out”– so to speak– without any external support.

“This is literally the first time the robot has walked on stage without a tether, on stage tonight,” Musk added. “The robot can actually do a lot more than we showed you. We just don’t want it to fall on its face.”

Advertisement
-
-

Tesla reveals videos of Optimus or in this case “Bumble-Cee” doing “work” around the Tesla office. Optimus carried a box from one area to another, watered plants, and even worked at the factory for a bit. The Tesla bot’s vision is very similar Autopilot.

Tesla also revealed Optimus’ potential final unit one production design. “Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as soon as possible,” said Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO also shared that Tesla aims to make Optimus’ price less than $20,000 or cheaper than a car.

Tesla is using some of the technology in its car in Optimus’ body as well, such as the battery pack, cooling system and more. The company also uses that same technology it uses for its cars to simulate Optimus’ movements and reactions to external collisions.

Tesla is basing Optimus’ body design on the human body. The company has been closely studying the structure of the human body while making the humanoid robot’s overall design. For instance, Tesla designed Optimus’ hands with the idea that factories worldwide are designed ergonomically, or optimized for the human hand. Teslarati briefly covered the significance of robots’ hands in a previous article, linked below.

FSD Beta Updates

The Tesla FSD Beta now has 160,000 customers, compared to 2,000 customers in 2021. Tesla is expected to release v.10.69.2.3 after AI Day, although a precise roll out date has not be announced yet.

Tesla explained the progress its made with Full Self-Driving Beta. The Tesla FSD experts explained how the Full Self-Driving makes decision to AI day guests and the role that customer data played to refine the software. The company also explained occupancy and the role it plays with 3D mapping and providing a birds-eye-view for the car. Tesla is working hard to optimize its video model training as well.

Tesla also talked a lot about its FSD Lane Networks during AI Day 2022. In the past few weeks, Teslarati has received reports from FSD testers, who specifically brought up issues with lane selection. To see “under the hood”–so to speak–somewhat explains the lane issues FSD testers experience on the road.

After multiple test loops and drives, there’s really just one main problem remaining for me at this point on 10.69.2, it’s significant, and that is lane selection,” noted long-time FSD tester Les. 

Tesla has developed a new auto-labeling machine to help with 3D labeling. The FSD experts explained how the software uses other clips to fill out the picture under certain conditions when the camera shows an unclear picture.

Tesla also talked a bit about simulation. The experts showed how it could simulate worlds or environments, using the data gathered from its fleet. It revealed a simulation of San Francisco that was created within two weeks by one employee. Tesla may update a simulated world quickly and as updated develop.

Dojo Updates

Tesla’s goal with Dojo is to build a single accelerator. A key step to realizing its goals was its training tile, which it unveiled during AI Day 2021. Tesla has been trying to figure out how to make its Dojo design scalable and has run into challenges along the way. However, the company’s “fail fast” mindset has helped it push through road blocks and move forward.

The Dojo team showed images of a Cybertruck and Semi running on Mars using stable diffusion achieved through Dojo.

Tesla experts explained that Dojo reduced work that would usually take months to a single week.

Tesla plans to build its first Exapod by 2023, which is expected to significantly increase its autolabeling output . It will be the first Exapod of 7 that Tesla plans to build in Palo Alto.

Tesla ended AI Day 2022 by answering questions from attendees. Tesla hopes that through their thorough explanations during the event, the company would be seen as more than an automaker. And, of course, Tesla hopes that its AI Day 2022 presentation also entices talented individuals to join the company.

The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, contact me at maria@teslarati.com or via Twitter @Writer_01001101

Maria--aka "M"-- is an experienced writer and book editor. She's written about several topics including health, tech, and politics. As a book editor, she's worked with authors who write Sci-Fi, Romance, and Dark Fantasy. M loves hearing from TESLARATI readers. If you have any tips or article ideas, contact her at maria@teslarati.com or via X, @Writer_01001101.

Advertisement
Comments

Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

on

By

Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

on

By

The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most

Published

on

By

Rendering of Elon Musk overlooking a Starship fleet (Credit: Grok)

SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.

Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.

SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles

The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”

When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.

The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.

None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.

Continue Reading