Elon Musk has revealed that he has difficulty recruiting AI engineers to work at Tesla because many candidates or employees are solely focused on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) - AI models with the intellect of a human or beyond.
His admission came in an earnings call yesterday after analysts asked the billionaire about reports that claimed a huge shipment of 12,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs had been redirected from Tesla to X (the social network formerly known as Twitter) and its artificial intelligence startup xAI. Tesla is now developing a humanoid robot called Optimus and a self-driving minicab called RoboTaxi - both of which rely heavily on AI.
After he was quizzed about the allocation of capital investments between his various ventures, Musk replied: "You're referring to a very old article regarding GPUs. Tesla simply had no place to try them on.
"So it would have been a waste of Tesla capital because we would just have to order H100s and have no place to try them on. So I was just – this wasn't a let's pick xAI over Tesla... the Tesla data centres were full. There was no place to actually put them."
He went on to reveal that an extension to the Tesla Gigafactory in Texas will soon house 50,000 H100s and that his staff are "beginning to move the H100 server racks into place".
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However, even though Tesla is clearly a place where AI skills in demand, engineers have other ideas about what they want to focus on.
"What I was finding was that when trying to recruit people to Tesla, they were only interested in working on AGI and not on Tesla's specific problems and they want to do a start-up," Musk said.
"So it was a case of either they go to a start-up and I am involved or they do a start-up and I am not involved. Those are the two choices.
"They were not going to come to Tesla under any circumstances."
He added: "I tried to recruit them to Tesla, including [saying], like, you can work on AGI if you want and they refused. Only then was xAI created."
Ambitious engineers might want to think again about working with Tesla if Musk's bold predictions about its future come to pass. He said that the long-term value of its robot, Optimus, will "exceed that of everything else [at] Tesla combined".
"I think everyone on earth is going to want one," he added, claiming demand for general-purpose humanoid robots across industry and consumer would soar to "in excess of 20 billion units."
The billionaire also suggested that the market cap for autonomous transport could reach $5 trillion - whilst the figure for human-like robots soars to "several times that number."
"In the benign AI scenario, we are headed for an age of abundance, where there is no shortage of goods and services," he added. "Anyone can have pretty much anything they want. It's a pretty wild future we are heading for."
