Musk Has Shot Himself In The Foot

With a bazooka.

Elon Musk — WikiCC

The Musk-Altman court case is nothing short of hilarious. Musk is angry that Altman runs a for-profit AI company, while he himself runs an openly for-profit one. He is also rather miffed that Altman isn’t developing an AI for the betterment of humanity, as was OpenAI’s founding goal, all while his AI’s most prominent feature is the violation of women and girls and the generation of child sexual abuse material. Yet Musk seems totally unaware of this painfully deep hypocrisy. As usual, Musk’s cavernous ignorance, utter stupidity, and blatant superficiality were also on full display. Despite being a founding investor in OpenAI, Musk admitted in court that he “did not read the fine print” of an OpenAI term sheet Altman had sent his way in 2018 when Musk stepped off the OpenAI board. The opposing lawyer retorted in dismay, “It’s a four-page document.” Yowch. But don’t go thinking Sammy Boy comes across well either. This lawsuit is also airing his manipulative leadership and wild greed for everyone to see. No one is coming out of this fight clean. But there was one detail that came to light that I simply can’t get out of my head. One that destroys the load-bearing myth of Musk’s and Tesla’s entire narrative.

When taking the stand under oath, Musk told the court that Tesla has no plans to pursue AGI.

That is completely at odds with what he has repeatedly claimed publicly and with what he has told Tesla shareholders.

Back in 2023, he claimed that Tesla may have “figured out some aspects of AGI”, as he believes that Tesla vehicles now have “a mind”. In 2024, he predicted AGI would arrive in 2025, heavily implying his companies would be the ones to achieve it. When that didn’t happen, he predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence by the end of 2026, again with the heavy implication that his companies would lead the way. As recently as this March, he claimed that Tesla would be “one of the companies to make AGI” and “probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form”. What’s more, Tesla’s most important projects, FSD, Robotaxis and the Optimus robot — you know, the projects that make Tesla so valuable to investors — all depend on eventually unlocking AGI to function correctly.

So, either Musk lied under oath, or he has committed a Theranos-level amount of fraud.

It’s also possible that he is so damn stupid, ignorant and careless that he doesn’t understand AI, AGI or what on Earth is going on at Tesla. Now, while that very well may be true (read more here and here), such an admission would warrant his immediate ousting as CEO.

Either way, Musk has been forced to tell the truth or face genuine legal repercussions, and in doing so, he has trapped himself between a rock and a hard place.

But this disclosure goes quite a bit deeper than ‘He said Tesla would have AGI, and now he is saying they won’t.’ You see, Tesla’s entire roadmap, future prospects and current valuation all depend on it unlocking AGI.

Let’s start with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD), the system designed to make all Teslas drive themselves and power Tesla’s Robotaxis. Because of the utterly deranged way Elon designed the system, it needs AGI to be even remotely safe.

Musk forced Tesla engineers to make FSD vision-only, relying solely on cameras to interpret the world around it. FSD, unlike almost all other self-driving systems, also runs without referencing detailed 3D maps. In other words, the AI is operating alone, and there is no redundancy in the system. This means that FSD’s computer vision and self-driving AIs need to have near-perfect human-level reasoning abilities for FSD to understand and navigate the roads as safely as a human.

This is especially true for edge cases. These are exceedingly rare scenarios that aren’t well represented in the AI’s training data. The only thing modern AI systems do is use statistical trends in training data to calculate what the next step should statistically be. This means modern AIs almost always fail on edge cases they encounter, as they don’t have enough data to form accurate trends. Individual edge cases are exceedingly rare, but there are practically an infinite number of different edge cases, especially with self-driving cars (since public roads are highly chaotic), so this is quite a frequent problem. This also means that training an AI on data to solve this issue isn’t viable, as each individual edge case happens so infrequently that we can’t gather enough data. Because FSD has no other systems to help it navigate edge cases safely, it needs to develop human-level reasoning abilities to do so.

To put it another way, for FSD and, in turn, self-driving Teslas, such as Tesla Robotaxis, to function safely, Tesla has to create an AI that matches or surpasses human reasoning abilities. That is literally the definition of AGI! So, no AGI, no autonomous Teslas. And that isn’t just my opinion; many experts believe this to be the case. Indeed, Musk’s claims back in 2023 that Tesla may have “figured out some aspects of AGI” point to the fact that he knows this!

Just to remind you, ARK Invest has estimated that Tesla’s FSD-powered Robotaxis will generate Tesla $4 trillion a year in revenue by 2030.

But how can that possibly happen if Tesla isn’t pursuing AGI? You can’t have one without the other. Tesla not pursuing AGI totally undermines ARK Invest and Tesla’s Robotaxi narrative.

The same is true of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot.

Musk has publicly claimed he aims to sell a million of these bots a year. Indeed, the volume of production is key to the value Tesla investors see in the Optimus project. To find a million buyers per year, this robot needs to be able to do almost anything and be easy to use. In other words, it needs to be general-purpose, and programming it to complete tasks needs to take no technical ability. Indeed, Musk has said that “it’ll do anything you want” and that it will be programmed to complete tasks using natural language; in other words, all you have to do is tell it what to do, and it will follow your instructions.

I cannot fathom an AI application that depends on AGI more than Optimus. Not only does this AI need to interpret human commands into real-world actions, which is infinitely more complex than what AI chatbots do, but it also needs to have a human-level understanding and reasoning of the world, how it works, and the aim of the task at hand. Humanoid robots also exist in far more chaotic environments than self-driving cars, and even the simplest tasks they will be asked to do are much more complex, chaotic, and unstructured than driving a car. To put it simply, these robots will encounter exponentially more edge cases than FSD will. Overcoming those hurdles will require human-level reasoning. For Optimus to work as promised and even have a chance of being the commercial success Musk says it will be, it needs AGI.

As a side note, rival humanoid robot companies like Boston Dynamics solve this problem by training their robots to do specific tasks for each deployment, deploying them in more controlled environments like factories, and aiming to sell them at far smaller scales to allow for more precise technical support.

Again, Ark Invest and many other Tesla investors believe that Optimus will eventually bring more value to Tesla than Robotaxis.

But how can it do that if Optimus depends on AGI and Tesla isn’t even pursuing AGI?

Musk admitting under oath that Tesla isn’t chasing AGI jeopardises the load-bearing myth of the narrative that keeps Tesla’s valuation so sky-high.

Now, don’t get me wrong; AGI is not possible with today’s AI technology. We need something totally different, a revolution from the ground up, and a move from statistical extrapolation to actual cognition. We are not even close to being able to create AGI. In a way, Musk is right not to pursue AGI, because as it stands, it is a fool’s errand. Had Musk not bet the entire future of his most valuable company on unlocking AGI in the next few years, I would be absolutely fine with him not chasing it. But he has bet the entire future of Tesla on creating AGI in the next few years.

This tiny moment in this giant, sprawling, chaotic court case is an example of Musk shooting himself in the foot for the world to see. It proves that Musk is a manipulative, deceitful, ignorant and — quite frankly — deranged CEO who is leading Tesla towards a crushing dead end. I wonder how many more blatant examples like this Tesla investors will need to witness before they either jump ship or vote this rot out of his technothrone

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