TECH NEWS – The owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter claims that unused Tesla vehicles could be put to good use.

During the Q&A section of the company’s latest earnings call, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, raised the idea of using 100 million Tesla vehicles to create a massive distributed inference fleet. This concept likely stemmed from discussions about the capabilities of the upcoming Tesla AI5 chip, said to be up to 40 times faster than the current AI4 chip built into many Tesla cars. Musk questioned whether the upcoming chip might be too intelligent for a car, which prompted him to come up with a concept he had apparently been considering for some time.

“One of the things I thought is that if we have all these cars that are maybe bored, we could have a giant distributed inference fleet if they’re not actively driving. At some point, if you’ve got 100 million cars in the fleet and they each have a kilowatt of inference capability, that’s 100 gigawatts of inference with cooling and power conversion taken care of. So that seems like a pretty significant asset,” Musk said.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Much of the processing power of modern cars, especially those with high-tech chips, likely remains unused beyond Tesla’s ongoing struggle to perfect its self-driving systems. If they were connected in large numbers, similar to SETI@home and other distributed computing platforms, it could be a good use of their capabilities. Musk is probably referring to privately owned cars connected to a central server via the internet, not warehouses full of Tesla vehicles running Grok or similar programs.

It’s difficult to convince people that owners of privately owned vehicles would use their battery power or wall sockets to run chips in their cars for Musk’s other projects, such as xAI. Not to mention, the potential lifespan of these chips could be shortened by frequently performing complex AI tasks. Perhaps a profit-sharing system is needed.

Source: PCGamer, Tom’s Hardware