Dear Reader,
Smartly designed to attract artificial intelligence (AI) engineers, Tesla’s AI Day has become one of the most important events of the year for high tech. For those who’re interested, it runs for about three hours and 20 minutes and can be found on YouTube.
The event was held last Friday, and while the goal for Tesla was recruitment, there are remarkable insights to glean for investors and technologists interested in the field of AI.
Unsurprisingly, the progress made by Tesla over the last year is nothing short of extraordinary. It amazes me there are so many critics of the event.
Last year, CEO Elon Musk cleverly demonstrated a mockup of what was to become Optimus—Tesla’s bipedal robot designed to support humans. Hilariously, Optimus was actually a human dressed up as the robot dancing on stage.
Many made fun of Musk at the time… but they’re not laughing now.
An Optimus prototype is real. Not only is there a clear path toward commercialization, but one at which the price point is less than $20,000. At this price, Optimus would be accessible to both large and small businesses, and even normal consumers.
Tesla’s announcements concerning high-performance computing and autonomous driving technology were no less impressive.
More than 160,000 customers now use Tesla’s full self-driving (FSD) software. It’s not yet perfect, but no other company comes close. Despite this, the automotive industry and many tech journalists like to pretend that FSD doesn’t really exist.
The tech that Tesla’s building is revolutionary. It will disrupt and change the entire transportation sector. But the disruption has nothing to do with being an electric vehicle (EV), and everything to do with being an AI-powered mode of transport.
Tesla’s ambitions with robotics are no different. The robotic hardware is just the medium. The revolution will happen because of the AI software.
Bipedal robots with human-like hands for object manipulation will be everywhere in a matter of years. They’ll augment human labor, increase productivity, result in less workplace injuries, provide care for aging populations, provide security, and even help us out around the house.
Optimus will do for human labor what the iPhone did for so many aspects of our lives. Programmable, upgradeable, and capable of performing the work of so many different devices that simply collapsed into software applications able to leverage the iPhone’s hardware.
Optimus will do the same for the physical world—the difference being we’ll be able to teach it desired tasks. And it will learn, remember, and optimize everything that we need it to perform.
With that will come an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. New jobs are already being created. There are a long list of well-funded competitors who thought they were ahead… and now they’re all nervous after Friday’s event.
The significance of what’s happening isn’t just some kind of new, cool technology. What Tesla’s doing with Optimus will transform society. It will improve productivity and quality of life.
And Tesla will become a multitrillion-dollar company in the process.
Years ago, when I first recommended Tesla, I made a strong argument that Tesla really wasn’t an automotive company, but one of the most successful AI companies on the planet. I’d never received so much critical feedback from my subscribers about anything I’d ever written before my Tesla research.
Even with the latest pullback in the market, Tesla is still up more than 1,000% since that recommendation. And there’s so much more to come. I hope everyone can see it now.
In tomorrow’s The Bleeding Edge, we’ll dive deeper into Tesla’s AI Day. It’s too important not to have a closer look. That means tomorrow, our three topics will cover the three most exciting developments at Tesla in regard to AI.
I’m sure you’ll find it interesting, so be on the lookout for it.
What a difference a few weeks make.
Last month, we talked about the big partnership between T-Mobile and SpaceX’s Starlink division. The two will enable satellite-based communications for smartphones used on T-Mobile’s wireless network.
Of course, this service only works for text communications. Satellite connectivity to a smartphone over standard wireless frequencies can’t provide the bandwidth needed for video applications. But this is great for consumers who are often in rural or remote areas without coverage.
And here’s the best part: This new service will work on smartphones as there are no modifications necessary.
It seems this is suddenly a hot topic.
The T-Mobile / Starlink announcement was intentionally released to beat Apple to the punch. During Apple’s major product announcement for its smartphones last month, the tech giant announced a similar service for its iPhones. And Apple partnered with legacy incumbent Globalstar for satellite connectivity.
But the story gets even better…
A start-up that we know well here at The Bleeding Edge may very well be ahead of everyone else.
Lynk Global just received approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for its version of the same service. Lynk will be the first to enable a commercial satellite-to-phone messaging service.
Regular readers may remember Lynk. We talked about this next-generation satellite tech company last year.
Lynk maintains its own satellite constellation. And its technology can enable communications directly to/from smartphones through satellites in orbit. That’s a tough problem to solve for connectivity with something like a smartphone as opposed to a large, fixed satellite dish.
And what’s most notable here is that Lynk managed to get FCsC approval. The FCC has tough standards that need to be met. It’s arguably the strictest communications regulator in the world.
Lynk already has 15 contracts that cover 36 countries to provide satellite to smartphone communications. The FCC approval will accelerate regulatory approval in other markets, which means that Lynk is now in the front of the pack for global deployments for this kind of communications service.
Needless to say, this is an early stage company we want to watch very closely.
I’m very excited to see how Lynk’s launch goes. I suspect we’ll see numerous deployments over the next year.
This technology will have fantastic benefits to society as well. It will put the equivalent of an expensive satellite phone in the hands of every smartphone owner, which will be a great resource for emergency services outside of the range of wireless networks.
OpenAI has done it again.
Readers will perhaps remember OpenAI best for its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) known as GPT-3. We’ve talked about GPT-3 quite a bit recently in The Bleeding Edge.
The same team just released a brand-new AI called Whisper. And it’s equally as impressive.
Whisper was built on a neural network. This is the same kind of underlying AI technology that powers our Perceptron trading system. And it can recognize and translate speech in a way that no AI has been able to before.
Whisper was trained on 680,000 hours of audio resourced from the internet. And OpenAI intentionally trained it using speech that’s difficult to understand.
The hours of audio included speech with different dialects and accents. Other clips in the training data had heavy background noise. There were also “speed talking” clips. They sound a lot like auctioneers talking a fast as they can. OpenAI intentionally chose difficult-to-understand audio in order to increase the range and capability of the AI.
As a result, Whisper has a much deeper understanding of accents and languages than any other AI on the planet.
And get this: OpenAI has already open-sourced this technology. That means anyone who wants to use Whisper can embed the AI into their own software applications.
And if they take it one step further and pair Whisper with natural language processing (NLP) tech, anything can become a conversational AI capable of understanding and engaging with humans.
To me, this was the missing piece when it comes to speech recognition technology.
Imagine having Whisper embedded on our smartphone, or perhaps a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses.
The AI could automatically transcribe the conversations happening around us and display it as text either on our phone or in the lenses of our AR glasses. Or Whisper could quietly translate the speech for us through the speaker in our ear pods or in the temple of our glasses.
The end product will be an AI assistant that could automatically translate foreign languages and difficult-to-understand accents for consumers—all in real time. All of the world’s language barriers would instantly fall away.
Releasing Whisper into the wild by open sourcing this technology is an accelerant to adoption. It enables companies to leverage the AI technology and turn it into highly functional and useful consumer and business products at an accelerated pace.
We’ll wrap up today with another exciting development in the commercialization of space.
I suspect regular readers are familiar with Axiom Space at this point. This is the private space company that’s set to launch the world’s first-ever private space station. The first Axiom modules will be launched within the next 14 months or so.
Axiom just announced that it inked a deal with Saudi Arabia’s government to fly two Saudi astronauts on a private space mission. That mission will go up next year.
This follows a similar deal that Axiom inked with Turkey recently. And Axiom Space is having discussions with a number of other governments as well.
When we think of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, these are two countries that have never had prominent space programs.
In fact, human access to Earth’s orbit has historically been controlled by the U.S. and Russia, with the more modern entrant of China. If anyone has wanted a ride to orbit, it had to be with one of these three countries.
But those days are over.
Private companies like Axiom Space are effectively democratizing access to space. They’re opening the doors to both commercial and public space travel in the years to come.
A big reason for this is the cost.
If we remember, Axiom plans to use SpaceX’s rockets to launch its missions. And SpaceX’s system for reusing its heavy launch rockets has driven down launch costs by over 90%.
That means commercial launches are suddenly affordable and accessible for those countries who have never had access to space before. Countries can now develop space programs without having to endure the costs of tens of billions of dollars of investments for launch systems and orbital habitats.
And access is just the beginning.
What we’re really looking at here is the beginnings of an emerging space economy. Most of the companies operating in this emerging industry are still private. There are very few publicly traded companies that are part of this trend, as the best of this next generation of aerospace companies have been privately funded.
I’m happy to say that’s all about to change in the next 12 to 24 months. And we’re going to be all over it.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
