Tesla’s AI Day is here. In a few minutes, Tesla watchers would be seeing executives like Elon Musk provide an in-depth discussion on the company’s AI efforts on not just its automotive business but on its energy business and beyond as well. AI Day promises to be yet another tour-de-force of technical information from the electric car manufacturer. Thus, it is no surprise that there is a lot of excitement from the EV community heading into the event.
Tesla has kept the details of AI Day behind closed doors, so the specifics of the actual event are scarce. That being said, an AI Day agenda sent to attendees indicated that they could expect to hear Elon Musk speak during a live keynote, speak with Andrej Karpathy and the rest of Tesla’s AI engineers, and participate in breakout sessions with the teams behind Tesla’s AI development.
Similar to Autonomy Day and Battery Day, Teslarati would be following along on AI Day’s discussions to provide you with an updated account of the highly-anticipated event. Please refresh this page from time to time, as notes, details, and quotes from Elon Musk’s keynote and its following discussions will be posted here.
Simon 19:40 PT – A question about the use cases for the Tesla Bot was asked. Musk notes that the Tesla Bot would start with boring, repetitive, work, or work that people would least like to do.
Simon 19:25 PT – A question about AI and manufacturing is asked and how it potentially relates to the “Alien Dreadnaught” concept. Musk notes that most of Tesla’s manufacturing today is already automated. Musk also noted that humanoid robots would be done either way, so it would be great for Tesla to do this project, and safely as well. “We’re making the pieces that would be useful for a humanoid robot, so we should probably make it. If we don’t someone else will — and we want to make sure it’s safe,” Musk said.
Simon 19:15 PT – And the Q&A starts. First question involves open-sourcing Tesla’s innovations. Musk notes that it’s pretty expensive to develop all this tech, so he’s not sure how things could be open-sourced. But if other car companies would like to license the system, that could be done.
Simon 19:11 PT – There will really be a “Tesla Bot.” It would be built by humans, for humans. It would be friendly, and it would eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks. This is still petty darn unreal. It uses the systems that are currently being developed for the company’s vehicles. “There will be profound applications for the economy,” Musk said.
Simon 19:06 PT – New products! A whole Tesla suit?! After a fun skit, Elon says the “Tesla Bot” would eventually be real.
Simon 19:00 PT – What is crazy is that Dojo is not even done. This is just what it is today. Dojo is still evolving, and it is going to be way more powerful in the future. Now, it’s Elon Musk’s turn. What’s next for Tesla beyond vehicles.
Simon 19:00 PT – Venkataramanan teases the ExaPOD. Yet another revolutionary solution from Tesla. With all this, it is evident that Tesla’s approach to autonomy is on a whole other level. It would not be surprising if it takes Wall Street and the market a few days to fully absorb what is happening here.
Simon 18:55 PT – The specs of Dojo are insane. Behind its beastly specs, it seems that Dojo’s full potential lies in the fact that all this power is being used to do one thing: to make autonomous cars possible. Dojo is a pure learning machine, with more than 500,000 training nodes being built together. Nine petaflops of compute per tile, 36 terabytes per second of off-tile bandwidth. But this is just the tip of the iceberg for Dojo.
Simon 18:50 PT – Ganesh Venkataramanan, Project Dojo’s lead, takes the stage. He states that Elon Musk wanted a super-fast training computer to train Autopilot. And thus Project Dojo was born. Dojo is a distributed compute architecture connected by network fabric. It also has a large compute plane, extremely high bandwidth with low latencies, and big networks that are partitioned and mapped, to name a few.
Simon 18:45 PT – Milan Kovac, Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Engineering takes the stage. He notes that he would discuss how neural networks are run in the company’s cars. He notes that Tesla’s systems require supercomputers.
Simon 18:40 PT – Ashok notes that simulations have helped Tesla a lot already. It has, for example, helped the company identify pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle detection and kinematics. The networks in the vehicles were traded to 371 million simulated images and 480 million cuboids.
Simon 18:35 PT – Ashok notes that these strategies ultimately helped Tesla retire radar from its FSD and Autopilot suite and adopt a pure vision model. A comparison between a radar+camera system and pure vision shows just how much more refined the company’s current strategy is. The executive also touched on how simulations help Tesla develop its self-driving systems. He states that simulations help when data is difficult to source, difficult to label, or in a closed loop.
Simon 18:30 PT – Ashok returns to discuss Auto Labeling. Simply put, there is so much labeling that needs to be done that it’s impossible to be done manually. He shows how roads and other items on the road are “reconstructed” from a single car that’s driving. This effectively allowed Tesla to label data much faster, while allowing vehicles to navigate safely and accurately even when occlusions are present.
Simon 18:25 PT – Karpathy returns to talk about manual labeling. He notes that manual labeling that’s outsourced to third-party firms is not optimal. Thus, in the spirit of vertical integration, Tesla opted to establish its own labeling team. Karpathy notes that in the beginning, that Tesla was using 2D image labeling. Eventually, Tesla transitioned to 4D labeling, where the company could label in vector space. But even this was not enough, and thus, auto labeling was developed.
Simon 18:23 PT – The executive states that traffic behavior is extremely complicated, especially in several parts of the world. Ashok notes that this partly illustrated by parking lots and how they are actually complex. Summoning a car from a parking lot, for example, used to utilize 400k notes to navigate, resulting in a system whose performance left much to be desired.
Simon 18:18 PT – Ashok notes that when driving alongside other cars, Autopilot must not only think about how they would drive, they must also think about how other cars would operate. He shows a video of a Tesla navigating a road and dealing with multiple vehicles to demonstrate this point.
Simon 18:15 PT – Director of Autopilot Software Ashok Elluswamy takes the stage. He starts off by discussing some key problems in planning in both non-convex and high-dimensional action spaces. He also shows Tesla’s solution to these issues, a “Hybrid Planning System.” He demonstrates this by showing how Autopilot performs a lane change.
Simon 18:10 PT – Karpathy’s discussion notes that today, Tesla’s FSD strategy is a lot more cohesive. This is demonstrated by the fact that the company’s vehicles could effectively draw a map in real-time as it drives. This is a massive difference compared to the pre-mapped strategies employed by rivals in both the automotive and software field like Super Cruise and Waymo.
To solve several problems encountered over the last few years with the previous suite, Tesla re-engineered their NN learning from the ground up and utilized a multi-head route, camera calibrations, caching, queues, and optimizations to streamline all tasks.
(heavily simplified) pic.twitter.com/LG2TRgjxip
— Teslascope (@teslascope) August 20, 2021
Simon 18:05 PT – The AI Director discusses how Tesla practically re-engineered their neural network learning from the ground-up and utilized a multi-head route. These include camera calibrations, caching, queues, and optimizations to streamline all tasks. Do note that this is an extremely simplified iteration of Karpathy’s discussion so far.
Simon 18:00 PT – Karpathy covers more challenges that are involved in even the basics of perception. Needless to say, AI Day is quickly proving to be Tesla’s most technical event right off the bat. That said, multi-camera networks are amazing. They’re just a ton of work, but it may very well be a silver bullet for Tesla’s predictive efforts.
Simon 17:56 PT – Karpathy showcases a video of how Tesla used to process its image data in the past. He shows a popular video for FSD that has been shared in the past. He notes that while great, such a system proved to be inadequate, and this is something that Tesla learned when it launched Smart Summon. While per-camera detection is great, the vector space proves inadequate.
Simon 17:55 PT – Karpathy noted that when Tesla designs the visual cortex in its car, the company is modeling it to how a biological vision is perceived by eyes. He also touches on how Tesla’s visual processing strategies have evolved over the years, and how it is done today. The AI Director also touches on Tesla’s “HydraNets,” on account of their multi-task learning capabilities.
Simon 17:51 PT – Karpathy starts off by discussing the visual component of Tesla’s AI, as characterized by the eight cameras used in the company’s vehicles. The AI director notes that AI could be considered like a biological being, and it’s built from the ground up, including its synthetic visual cortex.
Simon 17:48 PT – Elon Musk takes the stage. He apologizes for the event’s delay. He jokes that Tesla probably needs AI to solve these “technical difficulties.” The CEO highlights that AI Day is a recruitment event. He calls Tesla’s head of AI Andrej Karpathy. There’s no better person to discuss AI.
Simon 17:45 PT – We’re here watching the AI Day FSD preview video and we can’t help but notice that… are those Waypoints?!
Simon 17:38 PT – Looks like we’ve got an Elon sighting! And a preview video too! Here we go, folks!
We’ve got an Elon sighting
— Rob Maurer (@TeslaPodcast) August 20, 2021
Simon 17:30 PT – A 30-minute delay. We haven’t seen this much delay in quite a bit.
Simon 17:20 PT – It’s a good thing that Tesla has great taste in music. Did Grimes mix this track?
Simon 17:15 PT – We’re 15 minutes in. “Elon Time” is going strong on AI Day. To be honest, though, this music would fit the “Rave Cave” in Giga Berlin this coming October.
Simon 17:10 PT – A good thing to keep in mind is that AI Day is a recruitment event. Some food for thought just in case the discussions take a turn for the extremely technical. AI Day is designed to attract individuals who speak Tesla’s language in its rawest form. We’re just fortunate enough to come along for the ride.
Tesla Board Member Hiro Mizuno sums it up in this tweet pretty well.
Anybody passionate about real world AI !! https://t.co/ydaWQlkE4O
— HIRO MIZUNO (@hiromichimizuno) August 20, 2021
Simon 17:05 PT – I guess AI Day is starting on “Elon Time?” We’re on to the next track of chill music.
Simon 17:00 PT – And with 5 p.m. PST here, the music is officially live on the AI Day live stream. Looks like we’re in for some wait. Wonder how many minutes it would take before it starts? Gotta love this chill music though.
Simon 16:58 PT – While waiting, I can’t help but think that a ton of TSLA bears and Wall Street would likely not understand the nuances of what Tesla would be discussing today. Will Tesla go three-for-three? It was certainly the case with Battery Day and Autonomy Day.
Made it pic.twitter.com/aAWqxgf0bP
— Johnna (@JohnnaCrider1) August 19, 2021
Simon 16:55 PT – T-minus 5 minutes. Some attendees of AI Day are now posting some photos on Twitter, but it seems like photos and videos are not allowed on the actual venue of the event. Pretty much expected, I guess.
Simon 16:50 PT – Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another Live Blog. This is Tesla’s most technical event yet, so I expect this one to go extremely in-depth on the company’s AI efforts and the technology behind it. We’re pretty excited.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to tips@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
News
Tesla ‘Killer’ heads to the graveyard as AFEELA taps out
SHM has officially discontinued development of its highly anticipated AFEELA electric vehicles. On March 25, the joint venture between Sony and Honda announced it would halt the AFEELA 1 luxury sedan and a planned SUV model.
There have been many Tesla “Killers” over the years, all of which have either failed to dethrone the automaker from its dominance in the United States, or even make it to the market altogether.
The Sony Honda Mobility (SHM) project, known as AFEELA, is the latest to make it to the grave, as the company announced its intentions to abandon the project earlier this week, Bloomberg reported.
SHM has officially discontinued development of its highly anticipated AFEELA electric vehicles. On March 25, the joint venture between Sony and Honda announced it would halt the AFEELA 1 luxury sedan and a planned SUV model.
🚗 Tesla Killers Graveyard:
Sony-Honda AFEELA
The sleek, AI-packed luxury sedan with PlayStation integration. Officially cancelled in March 2026 after Honda scaled back its EV plans.Fisker Ocean
Stylish SUV with solar roof promises. Company filed for bankruptcy in 2024 amid… https://t.co/Om14UhISOy— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 26, 2026
The decision follows Honda’s March 12 reassessment of its electrification strategy, which scrapped several upcoming EV programs amid slowing demand, high costs, and shifting market conditions.
SHM stated that it could no longer rely on key Honda technologies and manufacturing assets, leaving “no viable path forward.” Reservation fees for early buyers in California are being fully refunded, and the joint venture’s future is now under review.
Launched with fanfare in 2022, the AFEELA was positioned as a tech-forward premium EV blending Honda’s engineering reliability with Sony’s entertainment and AI expertise.
Prototypes featured advanced autonomous driving systems, immersive in-cabin displays, and even PlayStation integration, earning it early media labels as a potential “Tesla Killer.”
Priced around $90,000, the sedan was slated for limited production at Honda’s Ohio plant with deliveries targeted for late 2026. Industry watchers saw it as a serious challenger to Tesla’s dominance in software, connectivity, and premium appeal.
Yet, like many ambitious EV projects, it fell victim to broader industry headwinds: softening consumer demand, persistent high interest rates, and intense competition from established players.
The AFEELA joins a long list of vehicles once hyped as “Tesla Killers” that failed to deliver. In the late 2010s, Fisker’s second act, the Ocean SUV, promised stylish design and solid-state battery tech but collapsed into bankruptcy in 2024 after production delays, quality issues, and financial shortfalls.
Faraday Future poured billions into the FF 91 luxury sedan, touting it as a hyper-tech rival with unmatched performance and features; the company delivered fewer than 100 vehicles before fading into obscurity.
Lordstown Motors’ Endurance electric pickup generated massive pre-order buzz and Wall Street excitement but imploded after exaggerated range claims, a factory sale, and eventual bankruptcy.
Even Lucid Motors’ Air sedan, frequently called a Tesla slayer for its superior range and luxury, has struggled with sluggish sales and missed growth targets despite strong reviews.
Rivian’s R1T and R1S trucks enjoyed similar early acclaim and a blockbuster IPO, yet production ramp-up challenges and profitability woes have prevented it from dethroning Tesla.
The AFEELA’s quiet demise underscores a harsh reality in the EV sector. While Tesla’s first-mover advantage in software, charging infrastructure, and brand loyalty remains formidable, legacy automakers and tech newcomers alike continue to underestimate the complexities of scaling affordable, desirable electric vehicles.
As market realities force tough choices, the graveyard of “Tesla Killers” grows longer, another reminder that innovation alone is rarely enough to topple an established leader.
Elon Musk
TIME honors SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell: From employee No. 7 to world’s most valuable company
Time Magazine honors Gwynne Shotwell as SpaceX reaches a $1.25 trillion valuation and eyes its IPO.
TIME Magazine has put SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell on its cover, and the timing could not be more fitting. Published today, the profile of Shotwell arrives at a moment when the company she has quietly run for more than two decades stands at the center of the most consequential developments in aerospace, artificial intelligence, and the future of human civilization.
Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002 as its seventh employee and has never stopped expanding her role. She oversees day-to-day operations across multiple executive teams spanning Falcon, Starlink, Starship, and now xAI following SpaceX’s February 2026 merger with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, a deal that made SpaceX the world’s most valuable private company at a reported valuation of $1.25 trillion. A highly anticipated IPO is expected in the second quarter of 2026.
Will Tesla join the fold? Predicting a triple merger with SpaceX and xAI
Her track record is historic. She oversaw the first landing of an orbital rocket’s first stage, the first reuse and re-landing of an orbital booster, and the first private crewed launch to Earth orbit in May 2020. She built the Falcon launch manifest from nothing to more than 170 contracted missions representing over $20 billion in business. Under her operational leadership, SpaceX completed 96 successful missions in 2023 alone and has now flown more than 20 crewed Falcon 9 missions. Starlink, which she championed as a financial pillar of the company long before it was a mainstream topic, now connects tens of millions of users worldwide and provided a critical communications lifeline to Ukraine following the 2022 invasion.
Elon Musk has never been shy about what Shotwell means to him and to SpaceX. When she shared her vision for worldwide internet connectivity through Starlink, Musk responded on X with a simple statement, “Gwynne is awesome.” It is a sentiment that has been echoed across the industry. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson once said of Musk: “One of the most important decisions he made, as a matter of fact, is he picked a president named Gwynne Shotwell. She runs SpaceX. She is excellent.”
Gwynne is awesome https://t.co/tiXtMWJmPE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 28, 2024
Now, with Starship targeting its first crewed lunar landing under the Artemis program by 2028, an xAI integration underway, and a pending IPO that could reshape capital markets, Shotwell’s mandate has never been larger. She told Time that 18 Starships are already in various stages of construction at Starbase. “By 2028,” she said, gesturing across the factory floor, “these should be long gone. They better have flown by then.” If Shotwell’s history at SpaceX is any guide, they will.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s IPO might arrive sooner than you think
Musk has hinted for years that an eventual public offering was inevitable, though he has stressed the need to maintain operational focus. Insiders have told outlets that the CEO is pushing for a significant retail investor allocation, reportedly more than 20 percent of shares, and tighter lock-up periods to limit early selling pressure.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is on the verge of one of the most anticipated Initial Public Offerings (IPO) in history.
However, a new report from The Information indicates the rocket and satellite giant is aiming to file its IPO prospectus with U.S. regulators as soon as this week, or early next week at the latest.
People familiar with the plans told The Information that advisers involved in the process expect the IPO could raise more than 75 billion dollars, potentially making it the largest stock market debut ever and eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s 29.4 billion dollar offering in 2019.
The filing would mark the formal start of what has long been rumored: SpaceX’s transition from a closely held private powerhouse to a publicly traded company.
The timing aligns with earlier signals.
In late February, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was targeting a confidential IPO filing in March and a possible public listing in June, with a valuation north of 1.75 trillion dollars. At the time, the company’s private valuation hovered around 1.25 trillion dollars.
SpaceX considering confidential IPO filing this March: report
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, has been the primary driver of that surge, now serving millions of customers worldwide and generating steady revenue. Recent Starship test flights and a record pace of Falcon launches have further bolstered investor confidence.
Musk has hinted for years that an eventual public offering was inevitable, though he has stressed the need to maintain operational focus. Insiders have told outlets that the CEO is pushing for a significant retail investor allocation, reportedly more than 20 percent of shares, and tighter lock-up periods to limit early selling pressure.
A June listing would give SpaceX immediate access to public capital markets at a moment when demand for space-related stocks remains high. It would also allow early employees and long-time investors to cash out portions of their stakes while giving everyday shareholders a chance to own a piece of the company behind reusable rockets, global broadband, and NASA contracts.
Of course, nothing is certain until the SEC filing appears. Market conditions, regulatory reviews, and Musk’s own schedule could still shift timelines.
Yet the latest word from The Information suggests the window has opened. If the filing lands this week, SpaceX’s roadshow could begin in earnest within weeks, setting the stage for what many analysts already call the IPO of the decade.
Tesla lands on Fortune’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies and the Cybercab is why
Tesla ‘Killer’ heads to the graveyard as AFEELA taps out
TIME honors SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell: From employee No. 7 to world’s most valuable company
Elon Musk says Tesla is developing a new vehicle: ‘Way cooler than a minivan’
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