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Telsas in a parking lot in Brooklyn
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Machine Learnings

Musk says every Tesla is “capable of being a robotaxi.” But a report says the robotaxis are getting special parts.

Robotaxi hardware upgrades pour some water on Musk’s assertion that every Tesla could be a robotaxi.

Rani Molla

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly painted a future where all Teslas would be autonomous and revolutionize the economics of car ownership.

“In the future, most people are not going to buy cars,” he said on the company’s last earnings call. Instead, most people would utilize the Tesla Network, a ride-hailing service that would be made up of company-owned and personally owned vehicles. For those still bullish on buying, their Teslas would become income-generating assets that they lease out to the network when they’re not in use. That’s supposed to include current Tesla owners.

“The vast majority of the Tesla fleet that we’ve made is capable of being a robotaxi,” Musk said on the same call.

Ahead of the company’s tiny but mostly successful robotaxi launch over the weekend, Musk reiterated that the vehicles consumers are buying now, which make up the vast majority of its revenue, are the same ones that will be part of the autonomous ride-hailing future.

“These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving!” The robotaxi software, he said, which allows for unsupervised driving, was a “branch” of existing consumer software that would be rolled out to everyone “soon.”

But yesterday, Business Insider reported that Tesla is working on hardware modifications to its Model Ys specifically for the robotaxi program. That includes adding self-cleaning and more durable cameras, as well as a second telecommunications unit to “provide GPS coordinates for the vehicle and allow it to connect with remote operators,” among other changes.

The move suggests the obvious: the needs of a commercial vehicle are more demanding than that of consumer products. They’re also likely more expensive.

Musk has repeatedly knocked Google’s Waymo, which has a much bigger market so far than Tesla’s robotaxi, as costing too much. Indeed, the promise that every Tesla could be a robotaxi is central to the company’s promise to scale the service rapidly.

Presumably the company’s forthcoming Cybercabs — which are supposedly going into “volume production” next year — could bridge the gap between what is acceptable for individuals versus individuals hoping to lease their cars to the Tesla Network, but the BI report pours water on the idea that any car can be a robotaxi.

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OpenAI’s hot Sora video app is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen

OpenAI has generated some serious buzz surrounding its new Sora video generation app. The app is currently No. 3 on the iOS free app leaderboards, even though it’s invitation-only for the time being.

But users have been flooding social media with videos generated by Sora, and in addition to a “Skibidi Toilet” Sam Altman and the OpenAI CEO dressed as a Nazi, the app is able to create videos featuring iconic characters from Disney, Nintendo, and Paramount Skydance.

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

But OpenAI is trying to flip the responsibility of protecting copyrighted material to the intellectual property owners themselves. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is allowing copyrighted material in Sora by default, unless copyright holders opt out of the service.

The courts will have to decide if this novel approach to intellectual copyright law works, but government regulators may not be that big of a problem, as Altman has made sure OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration. If OpenAI has to pay up to copyright holders after a lawsuit, what’s a few billion dollars here or there when you’re raising so much capital?

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

But OpenAI is trying to flip the responsibility of protecting copyrighted material to the intellectual property owners themselves. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is allowing copyrighted material in Sora by default, unless copyright holders opt out of the service.

The courts will have to decide if this novel approach to intellectual copyright law works, but government regulators may not be that big of a problem, as Altman has made sure OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration. If OpenAI has to pay up to copyright holders after a lawsuit, what’s a few billion dollars here or there when you’re raising so much capital?

Yann Le Cun meta AI

Tension emerges between Meta’s AI teams

Discontent between Meta’s AI research teams is growing, according to a report by The Information, at a critical time for Meta’s effort to get back into the AI race.

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