Tesla Space #35: ⚡ Memphis Supercluster online — 🍬 Tesla candies — Cybertruck @ Fortnite

X OF THE WEEK

No, that’s not just a random image we — or some coin maxis — cooked up. It’s what Elon changed his profile picture to. Don’t worry, I’ll still get you your dose of X of the week:

We’ll dig deeper into this in our next video but the buildout of this has been crazy to watch. I’ve seen so many xAI and -related employees post how crazy their journey has been in building the cluster in a facility previously dubbed as “Gigafactory of Compute” especially for the speed of it all coming online.

One of those “supporting companies” mentioned on the post would be SuperMicro. The CEO of SuperMicro (if you follow the AI boom you’ve probably heard of the company, $SMCI), wrote from his fresh X account:

He has previously praised Elon for ‘leading the liquid cooling technology to large AI centers’, saying it may lead to preserving 20 billion trees for our planet.

Elon really did use ‘fresh’ technology here, as Supermicro started to ship the DLC (Direct Liquid Cooling) racks in volume to customers just from May — DLC has been adopted by <1% of all computing so far. Something which Charles expects will shoot up to 30% share of data center deployments in the next 12 months.

In the Jordan Peterson interview from today (2h, viewable here), Musk said this took 19 days to set up. Note, the interview itself is hardly watchable, and will consist of mostly Peterson talking with barely giving word to Elon. You’ve been warned.

Meanwhile, xAI founding member Toby Pohlen says “When we started the company a year ago, our objective was to achieve three advantages: A data advantage, a talent advantage, and a compute advantage. Starting today, we have all three.”

Musk says they are still looking to increase the human talent part at xAI, Tesla and X.

So what will the “world’s most powerful AI training cluster” be used for? So far we know at least one outcome — xAI’s Grok 3. Grok 2 is coming in August, which is trained on 24k H100s from Oracle, and is now going through finetuning and bug fixes, “probably ready to launch next month” per Musk.

He also commented on why they decided to end the deal with Oracle:

“The reason we decided to do the 100k H100 and next major system internally was that our fundamental competitiveness depends on being faster than any other AI company. This is the only way to catch up.

Oracle is a great company and there is another company that shows promise also involved in that OpenAI GB200 cluster, but, when our fate depends on being the fastest by far, we must have our own hands on the steering wheel, rather than be a backseat driver.”

Sidenote: I have access to the current Grok and have been mostly underwhelmed, but if you want to try it out with some prompts, shoot me a message.

Enough of AI for today? I agree. Enjoy this recruitment photo from xAi to finish our section:

Ah great, now I got Marc Cohn in my head singing “Training in Memphis…”

TESLA, GLOBALLY

Happy Earnings Day!

Today, about 9 hours from now, Tesla will publish the Q2 2024 financial results and will hold a Q&A webcast.

We’ll dig deeper into everything we can learn on today’s Earning’s Call in next week’s newsletter, but if you want the live show, you can find the call on live stream here, and keep an eye out for updates on our X account.

Meanwhile, here are the top questions they’ll have to answer from the verified shareholders through the Q&A on the Say platform:

“What is the status on the roadster?”, 1.8M TSLA shares represented;
"When exactly is the robo taxi event if not 08/08”
“When do you expect the first Robotaxi ride?”
“What is the current status of 4680 battery cell production and how is the ramp-up progressing?”
“Any update on Dojo?”
…and perhaps my favorite one:

“The Cybertruck is an iconic product that wows everyone who sees it, do you have plans to expand the “Cyber” vehicle line-up to a CyberSUV or CyberVan?”

BREAKING NEWS:

Tesla has filed four new trademark applications for four different pieces of candy. Official candy names in the filings:

• Supercharged Gummies

• Cyberberry

• Mango Bolt

• Dog Mode Chill

(sorry I just had to use that headline here)

Pair this news with Elon’s tweet in 2020 which implies it’s been on his mind for a while: “Big Candy is suppressing R&D! When’s the last time you heard of a great new candy bar?”

Trump says he will end the EV mandate on day one. Musk comments:

“A surprising number of people think that Tesla survives on subsidies. That is true of our competitors, but not of Tesla.”

While true since Tesla is the only EV maker that has enough margin to play with… would that truly help the mission of accelerating transition to sustainable energy?
If we could lose all subsidies, including those on fossil fuels, that would be a wholly other matter of course.

Here’s a list of current promotions for Tesla buyers in the US:

• Tesla is offering owners $1,000 off their next Tesla if they upgrade their Enhanced Autopilot to FSD, and transfer it to a new Tesla purchase. Delivery has to be done before Sept 30th.

• FSD is transferrable for free until Sept 30th.

• 3 months of free Supercharging for S, 3, X, Y deliveries before Aug 15th.

• $1.99 financing rate for Model Y (until Sept 30th).

• Free paint options for Model 3 Performance & Seating Layout option for Model X AWD if you add FSD to your order (helps qualify for fed EV credit).

THE VEHICLES

Police Tesla fleet management

Standard Fleet, which provides fleet management software for Teslas, is now collaborating with Unplugged Performance’s UP FIT division to streamline EV management for the all-electric police fleets. The first partner will be South Pasadena Police, the first police department in the USA to go fully electric.

Tesla increased prices of the all the Model S & X versions in US & Canada by $2,000.

🇨🇦 Tesla is still aiming to launch Cybertruck in Canada by the end of this year, per the official CT account. One of the milestones cleared for that has been Canadian government, which just now received an exemption for the Cybertruck allowing the company to use steer-by-wire. Wes Morrill, Lead Engineer of Cybertruck commented it is “an important milestone on our way to 🇨🇦”

Cybertruck, coming today to a game near you: Fortnite and Rocket League are about to drop Cybertruck in their games today… and that’s another 250M set of eyeballs on the truck.

Actually, I summed this up in an X post for you, with why I think Cybertruck will get more online impressions than any vehicle on the planet in 2024. The examples are real:

• Celebrities & news (ESPN post about celeb Cybertrucks got 700k likes)

• Games (Fortnite ~ 230M+ gamers)

• MrBeast et al (latest YT video with 10 Cybertrucks has gotten = 168M views)

• Every sighting and stunt with CT is shared online (∞ views).

Speaking of, here’s our latest stunt find from the Internet vaults — a wedding entrance… of the groom dancing in the back of the Cybertruck.

Tesla launches Cybertruck tailgate shield ($300) and the Cybertruck jumpseats ($100) on Tesla shop. Both, of course, out of stock now.

👀 Watch tip: 4-minute video of Cybertruck’s Off-Road Mode by Tesla.

👀 Watch tip #2: Model Y owner walks away unharmed after his car was hit from behind at ~70mph while he was waiting for a tow, parked by the side of the road. Footage here.

SUPERCHARGING & ENERGY

Pulling a charge from your Tesla?

The Finnish InterControl team was able to use their DC bi-directional wallbox with a three-year-old Tesla Model 3, with “no tricks, no tuning” and discharge it at 5kW.

There are quite a lot of manufacturers where the actual V2G capability is there to some extent, but often limited by the car software itself. Here are logfiles for 31 EV models tested for V2G by Pionix (github link).

Wild Supercharger spot of the week: St. Anton, Austria

Energy: 🇺🇸 Tesla signed an agreement for another 15.3 GWh (!) of Megapacks to Intersect Power, adding to 2.4 GWh already in operation or under construction. This contract should be worth over $3B.

For context: if you remember from our issue two weeks ago, Tesla deployed 9.4GWh in energy storage in Q2 2024, which was already more than twice its previous record.

TECH, FSD & SOFTWARE

FSD Updates

Currently, FSD V12.4(.3) is now out to a larger part of eligible vehicles, and the next big update, FSD V12.5 has been in employee testing, with the first owners from the “OG Testers” group getting the update yesterday. I’ll give a mix here of what we’ve found out Tesla has achieved with both.

Coming with V12.5(.x):

• Improvements focused on rarer, more complex situations;

• Vehicle-to-fleet communication (e.g road closures etc reported live to all across the Tesla fleet);

• Ability to reverse;

• Will once again merge the city & highway stacks

• V12.5 will finally bring FSD to the Cybertruck (we’ve spied validation CT’s with rooftop sensors now)

• Driver monitoring not allowing hands-free (“nag-free”) with sunglasses fixed (this is when Tesla uses cabin camera to monitor driver alertness).

• More of a smooth, confident ride (as evident from videos below).

I added the (.x) on the headline there, because the sunglass thing, reversing, and end-to-end highway stack update hasn’t been rolled out with this first 12.5, and Ashok yesterday commented it’ll be “coming in follow-up 12.5.x release”.

Back in May, Musk said:

“12.4 has almost completely retrained models. The final touches are for comfort, as it sometimes accelerates or brakes too fast for most people’s taste.

12.5 and 12.6 are in various stages of testing. We’re getting into rare, complex situations, for example: going down a narrow, one-way road, encountering a road closure and having to reverse out to find a new route.

That closure also needs to be communicated to the rest of the fleet, so you don’t get a whole bunch of Teslas stuck down a road 😂”

Will we also finally see ASS (Actually Smart Summon) go live with 12.5? No info on that yet. We have however seen some details in the Tesla App that hint at Tesla preparing for that.

Some short V12.5 videos from AI DRIVR:

• Handling a stubborn cat on a dark road perfectly. Seems object detection has gotten a lot better.

• Smoothness is improved, only uses regen instead of breaking when cut off by cyclist.

• The ‘delicacy with the steering wheel’ is smoother than any Uber

• Looks like it doesn’t slow for a yellow at the last sec as easily anymore.

• It also looks like the FSD would already like to shift to reverse by itself, but it’s not allowed to.

Overall he says the new build is a lot smoother and confident, the ‘creeping’ behavior is improved, no more speed control issues.

Tesla App updates (4.35.0 and 4.35.1)

Two larger additions are the parental controls we talked about last week:

Which, by the way, a top ICU doctor hails as they could prevent the 'tragic deaths' he 'frequently sees'.

And the “Does Not Wake Vehicle” — app now only wakes the vehicle when you send a command, to conserve the vehicle battery. The app will show the vehicle’s information with a disclaimer such as “Asleep for 3 hours”. If you send a command to the vehicle or pull down to refresh, it’ll wake up the car and give live status again.

THE MUSK CO

This is the spot where we write about Elon’s other companies… and also the wild out of the EVs bets he makes inside Tesla (like humanoids)

SpaceX shows the newly developed EVA spacesuit, testing with Polaris Dawn crew for their mission’s spacewalk (EVA = extravehicular activity = spacewalk).

“We should create a permanently occupied moonbase” — Elon, July 21st 2024.

If you read our last week’s newsletter, you saw Elon is now pushing for Trump to be elected, endorsed him publicly and may or may not have promised to drop $45/mo to Trump’s campaign. This has now resulted in Trump taking about 3 minutes to praise Elon’s space ventures on his latest speech.

Humanoids

Elon, yesterday: “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026.”

Separately, he said: “The new Optimus design, which will be complete later this year, is something special.” I wonder if we’ll see some updates of this at the robotaxi event.

Starlink

🇺🇸 SpaceX has now launched Starlink Mini Roam service in the US for everyone, not just Residential subscribers. It goes for $50/month (+hardware), and you’ll get 50GB/mo of Mobile data with portable or in-motion use. In case you missed it, the Starlink mini is about laptop sized, integrates the dish and Wi-Fi router and can be powered directly through 100W USB-PD source (like a power bank).

🇨🇦 Starlink now provides high-speed internet to more than 400,000 active Canadian customers, connecting ~3% of homes across the country.

Oh, and here’s SpaceX spacecraft (larger Dragon modification) render that is commissioned by NASA to act as an ISS deorbit vehicle (read: to help drop ISS safely in the ocean in 2031.) Love seeing SpaceX win this stuff just because nobody else today can make it happen.

Had more updates for ya, but we could fit it all in today’s newsletter. Keeping some stuff for next week, I guess. 🙂