SORRY! Is Tesla (the robot/ AI company) undervalued?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

First off, MASSIVE APOLOGY! Sorry.

Something happened on our backend systems this morning that replaced ALL the links in this edition to just that one Twitter embed link below about the PGA Tour robot mowers. WEIRD. So, sorry about that…mistakes happen. Thankfully that’s now hit the trash can and the real edition can be found below…

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

• Is Tesla changing…for the better?
• PGA Tour goes robotic
• OpenAI breaks free

If that’s enough to get the robots bartending, read on…

AI Collision 💥

How did you get on last week?

Was it effective? Productive? Did you catch up on a few emails, get a few jobs done?

I had a pretty good week. It was my son’s first week at Aussie school. I also got a bunch of important work recordings done for something pretty special we’ve got coming up about crypto (more on THAT soon!). Overall, I felt like it was a good week and felt good about myself…

… then I saw what Elon did this week…

When I wrote last Friday’s AI Collision, Tesla hadn’t hosted its “Robotaxi” event just yet. Now it has and wow – it was quite something. More on that in a sec…

It also wasn’t the only thing Elon did last week that was, shall we say, world changing.

While Robotaxi caught a lot of attention, SpaceX (Elon’s space company) also managed to send one of the world’s largest rockets in history into space, and then as its main booster fell back to earth, they caught the booster with a gigantic pair of chopsticks, mid-air.

Yes, that is as bonkers as it sounds. So, I guess the only thing to really help you understand the incredible nature of what SpaceX just did is to show you below:

Say what you will about Elon, there’s no one else on earth that can move the needle on entire industries and technology in the way he can.

What SpaceX just did, we’ll look back on in years to come as a game changer for the commercialisation of space. To catch a heavy booster like that, mid-air, it really is like magic.

Now the idea of lowering the cost of major deployments into space is very much a reality – and it’s also worth noting as you watch those videos, how often they refer to autonomous systems, automatic checks, things that are just done by computers and self-functioning systems.

This, of course, neatly takes us to the more consumer side of Elon’s busy week and the Robotaxi event. Autonomous cars that anyone can buy, autonomous humanoid robots that anyone can buy, and even an autonomous van that anyone can ride (yeah, that’s a bit like a tram but, we’ll keep that one aside for a while).

There’s no doubt that Elon’s team is intentionally designing these things based on the I, Robot movie starring Will Smith. You can see that comparison here (where the I, Robot director, Alex Proyas, wonders if there’s a copyright infringement taking place):

And yes, the event itself was called, We, Robot.

There was a lot that was released at the event, and I do think if you didn’t see it, you should. Like him or not, Musk is getting things done.

The market however, was not impressed. Tesla stock was down over 8% on Friday

As was repeatedly covered in the mainstream, it was full of Hollywood and not much substance.

But I think you doubt Musk at your own peril. Tesla is fast shifting away from being just a company that makes EVs. It feels like it is certainly more about the robotics and AI now – I would even go so far to suggest that maybe, just maybe, if he can pull off the idea of an Optimus robot in millions of homes worldwide, that maybe we should be starting to think of Tesla as undervalued.

What do you think?

AI gone wild 🤪

I just realised this week that pretty soon I’m going to be living in a house with nothing in it. We bought a house, but we’re also still waiting on all our gear to arrive on “the slow boat”, as we say to our boys.

That means about a three-to-four-week period where it’s going to be bare. But what I also realised this week is that I won’t have the tools at hand to mow the lawns. And as it’s spring here in Australia, that means the grass will be growing at some rate of knots.

There’s a few options up my sleeve.

1. Rope in my Dad to bring his mower over and do it for me, or I just borrow his mower.
2. Get onto Fiverr and get some local bloke to do it.
3. Use this as an unreasonable moment to finally buy that robotic lawnmower I always wanted.

I hadn’t really considered the third option until I was watching the PGA Tour over the weekend.

It’s kind of the PGA Tour “off season” at the moment, but they still have events, and money up for grabs. The one over the weekend was the Black Desert Championship in Utah.

Not exactly the biggest of tournaments, but I watched anyway. I also was scrolling through my X.com feed at the same time, when I chanced upon something incredible. The event was using fully autonomous, fully electric lawnmowers for its course maintenance, which you can see below.

I was intrigued by this, so I did a search for “AMP L100”, which was the model name you can see on the side of the mowers. And it came up with a Salt Lake City company, FireFly Automatix.

These mowers are LIDAR enabled, fully autonomous, fully electric mowers and at the cutting edge (intentional pun) of robotics, AI and autonomous systems.

I get the feeling that you might see more of these mowers dotted around the US in the near future, particularly at places like golf courses. And then not too long before we see them in the UK and Australia, two other places renowned for their golf courses.

I also get the feeling this is the kind of company that may have struck gold with this product, and that when expansion beckons, a stock listing might not be far away either.

Regardless of if that happens, I would remember the name FireFly Automatix. I think it won’t be the last you’ll hear about it in the next year or so.

While I don’t need one of those beasts for my backyard, it has still inspired me to seriously consider a robot mower for my place (finally). I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

Boom 📈

• C3.ai (NYSE:AI) up 13%
• Vicarious Surgical (NYSE:RBOT) up 12%
• Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 8%

Bust 📉

• Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) down 13%
• Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ:LTRN) down 8%
• iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) down 3%

From the hive mind 🧠

• The more I listen to Huang speak about Nvidia, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and what they’re looking to in the future, the more I think he may end up being the most influential person in history – up there with the likes of Newton, Einstein, Hawking, etc.
• Elon is trying to make the world fall in love with his iRobot-style, humanoid robots, making them become bartenders and general service robots, Amazon is however taking a different approach.
• He’s called the “godfather of AI” and just recently was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. Here’s why.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Last Friday’s edition of AI Collision got some wonderful comments and thoughts.

Notably, we got a lot of comments on the podcast digest of the nuclear report from the US Department of Energy. These were mainly commenting that the podcast hosts were quite superficial (I think this is the right word to summarise the sentiment) with their digest of the nuclear report.

That is, of course, because they were AI. I just uploaded the PDF, and in about a minute and a half there was the full 15-minute podcast discussing the document.

Considering the early-stage and experimental nature of Google’s NotebookLM, I thought it was good (although the voices grated on me after a while). I would suggest that sooner rather than later the idea of having your own personal “podcast” host to summarise and help you digest and understand lengthy content won’t be so foreign and this is merely the start of something that will be more ubiquitous.

Anyway, the actual poll from last week was about Elon’s Robotaxis. Would you, or wouldn’t you, ride in one if it pulled up on your doorstep?

I’m quite impressed by the results. I think if I’d asked this question when I first started covering this tech well over a decade ago, the responses would have been heavily skewed the other way.

Here’s the results…

A new poll will be with you on Friday.

Weirdest AI image of the day

Freedom – r/weirddalle

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision