Managing Editor’s Note: President Trump’s bold new initiative intends to return America to an era of sound money, eliminate our looming debt disaster, and kick off a Golden Century.
It’s something Jeff’s been closely tracking the development of since he learned about it during a recent trip to Washington, D.C. He calls it “Project MAFA,” and he’s revealing the details of this new plan – and how we can profit from it – this Wednesday, July 16, at 8 p.m. ET.
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It’s one of the most obvious missing links for full autonomy in a ride-hailing service…
The ability to interact with a robotaxi using voice commands.
Just think about it…
The single address for a large building – let’s say an airport – has multiple entrances and drop-off points. This can be somewhat mitigated by programming specific drop-off points into a ride-hailing app, which is what both Uber and Lyft do…
But what about delivering a rider to a location that doesn’t have multiple drop-off points programmed in the app?
And what about delivering riders to locations that are located off of mapped surface roads like, for example, a 100-acre farm with multiple buildings?
At the moment, if we are being driven by our Tesla, the only solution is to take over the car for the last several feet of driving, so that we can park the car or drive it to the desired building, door, or garage.
After a long ride on full autonomy, it’s not really much of a bother…
But there are two situations where this scenario creates a problem:
I’ve experienced this problem myself with Waymo when testing the service out in Arizona.
One of my trips was to get to a store in a shopping area. The Waymo simply stopped at a location and wouldn’t move further.
I had to get out of the Waymo and walk 300-400 feet to get to where I needed to go, which wasn’t a big deal for me. Close enough…
But what if it happened to someone who is handicapped, on crutches, or if it was pouring down rain?
How does the car get directed to the desired location?
I’ve long predicted that the answer will be a voice interface.
The passenger will simply be able to instruct the autonomous car to drive to the desired drop-off or parking location.
It’s a perfect solution for the last few hundred feet of driving, especially those related to large facilities and unmapped private roads or driveways.
Well, late last week, we got confirmation of what I believe will be the beginning of this feature becoming a reality.
Elon Musk just announced that xAI’s frontier AI model, Grok, will be available in “Tesla vehicles very soon.”
Source: X @elonmusk
And according to Musk, it will happen no later than this week.
I wasn’t surprised by the media coverage of this announcement.
Most of it was political, like this gem from Wired:
Elon Musk Says Grok Is Coming to Tesla EVs. Get ready for a few hard right turns.
Pathetic.
But as long as Musk owns X and defends freedom of speech, I fully expect the politics.
What did surprise me was that none of the media coverage actually made the connection of what this technology can be used for.
Wired further embarrassed itself with the following:
The EV brand would catch up with the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, which have already integrated ChatGPT into their vehicles as voice assistants.
All of the coverage was similar, suggesting that Tesla was behind or that all Tesla was doing was putting a large language model (LLM) or voice assistant into their electric vehicles.
And that’s where they all got it wrong… and I mean completely wrong.
xAI’s Grok isn’t a voice assistant. It’s not Siri or Alexa or ChatGPT…
It is a multi-modal frontier AI model – perhaps the most advanced in the world – capable of seeing and understanding the real world and capable of reasoning to find the optimal solution. It’s also an agentic AI capable of self-directed problem-solving.
Oh… and one more thing…
Grok is by far the closest AI that we have to representing an artificial general intelligence (AGI).
So no, this integration of Grok with Tesla’s EVs isn’t about adding a voice assistant.
The teams at Tesla and xAI are literally putting the two most powerful and intelligent artificial intelligences on the planet – FSD and Grok – onto the same robotics platform… Tesla’s EVs.
And don’t worry, the same thing will happen on Tesla’s humanoid robotic platform – Optimus.
The integration of Grok in Tesla EVs will serve two purposes.
The first purpose will be to solve the last mile, or last feet, navigation challenges that are best solved with voice commands.
Think about it. Tesla’s full self-driving (FSD) software is a wizard at getting us autonomously from point A to point B safely and stress-free. But today we’re not able to talk to the FSD, a powerful neural network that is incredible at safely navigating the real world.
The reason that we can’t speak to it is that it has no natural language processing capabilities. That’s not what it was designed for.
You know what – or rather, who – does? You guessed it. Grok.
And Grok can actually ingest real-time video and images from the real world… to see exactly what we see.
We’ll be able to converse with Grok and say things like, “Hey, Grok, please pull up next to the right side of the red barn and park next to the yellow tulips.”
Or how about, “Hey, Grok, please continue to drive forward and drop me off in front of Chipotle.”
Grok will be plugged into Tesla’s camera area all around the car with a 360-degree view. Not only will it be able to see what we see, but it will also be able to see some of what we can’t see but are looking for.
And the best part is that if Grok doesn’t understand your instructions, it can query us to confirm our intent.
And with the confirmed instructions, Grok will be able to “communicate” with FSD and complete the very last part of the journey.
Grok is the missing link.
Grok is our voice interface to FSD.
And Grok will also become a companion to Tesla passengers. Literally.
xAI announced last week that it is enabling a companion mode for Grok that will be customizable to Grok users.
Grok’s Settings | Source: xAI
Not only will Grok be a source of incredibly useful information – like finding the nearest place to find whatever we’re searching for – it will be like speaking to a friend, keeping us company when we’re being driven around. A companion that is literally smarter than any human on the planet, with the world’s repository of information at its fingertips.
Grok will be an interesting companion to a class clown as much as it will be to a savant.
What a pleasant way to ride…
Meanwhile, does it really come as such a big surprise that none other than SpaceX is investing $2 billion into xAI?
If you feel lonely on an hour-long trip in the car, just imagine how you’d feel on a seven-month trip to Mars.
Yes, you guessed it. I’m predicting that SpaceX will employ Grok, an agentic AI, soon to be an AGI, on SpaceX spacecraft. It makes perfect sense. Grok will be a voice interface to the Crew Dragon and Starship spacecraft control systems.
But the need for Grok is more urgent with Tesla right now…
xAI has done something extraordinary with Grok 4 – it’s just that the rest of the world hasn’t seen it yet. They haven’t connected the dots.
Next up will be an announcement that Tesla will invest in xAI. It’s perfectly logical.
xAI will quickly become one of Tesla’s most important suppliers, critical to the success of Tesla’s autonomous robots – both EVs and humanoids.
And Tesla has an abundance of cash, $37 billion at the moment, and it will generate roughly $8.5 billion more between this year and next year. Investing a couple billion into xAI – in order to ensure that xAI designs a version of Grok optimized for FSD – is perfectly logical.
Just wait for it…
Grok will be in our EVs, on our smartphones, in our tablets, on our PCs, on our desktops, and yes, even on our spacecrafts for those long trips to the Moon and Mars.
Ever present, omnipresent.
Jeff
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.
