„Macrohard“: Elon Musk announces joint project by xAI and Tesla

Elon Musk announced a joint project between his electric car manufacturer Tesla and the AI startup xAI on Wednesday. The system, which could replicate the functions of software companies, builds on xAI's “Macrohard“ project and Tesla's AI agent “Digital Optimus“, with xAI's AI language model Grok acting as the overarching “navigator“.

“Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint project between xAI and Tesla and part of the investment agreement between Tesla and xAI,“ Musk wrote in a post on his platform X. In January, Tesla announced it would invest two billion US dollars in xAI, also with a view to potential AI collaborations between the two companies. “Grok acts as a central conductor/navigator with a comprehensive understanding of the world and controls Digital Optimus, which processes and executes the last five seconds of screen display and mouse/keyboard inputs in real-time. Grok is comparable to a significantly more advanced and sophisticated version of navigation systems.“

One can imagine Digital Optimus as “the instinctive part“ and Grok as “the thinking part“ of this system, Musk continued. The intelligent real-time AI system runs on the “extremely inexpensive“ Tesla chip AI4, which is also found in Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) hardware 4, in combination with a “comparatively economical use“ of the significantly more expensive xAI Nvidia hardware. This is cost-effective. In principle, the AI system is capable of simulating software developments by companies like Microsoft, Musk said. “Hence the name MACROHARD – a tongue-in-cheek reference to Microsoft.“

xAI's Macrohard project stagnated

xAI first announced Macrohard in August last year. However, the Macrohard project has recently stalled due to restructuring in the management ranks and the suspension of a data project with 600 external employees, writes the news website Business Insider, citing people familiar with the situation. At the same time, Tesla has intensified its own AI agent project called “Digital Optimus“. The name is a reference to the humanoid Optimus robot that Tesla has been developing for several years.

Musk's X post on Wednesday, in which he announces the joint project by xAI and Tesla, appeared just a few hours after the publication of the Business Insider article. Most xAI engineers who worked on Macrohard have left the company lately or moved to another team, according to Business Insider. Employees were reportedly informed that part of the Macrohard work, as well as some of Macrohard's computing capacity, would be transferred to Tesla's Autopilot team.

Role model: Tesla's FSD system

Instead of primarily relying on models that analyze screenshots, which is a common approach for developing computer-controlled agents, according to Business Insider, that team is focusing on real-time control methods. The AI processes a continuous stream of information and reacts to it, rather than analyzing a still image and acting step-by-step. This approach is similar to the work with Tesla's FSD system, which uses video data to enable the AI to navigate its environment in real-time.

The project announcement by Musk comes after his space company SpaceX took over xAI via a stock swap last month and is facing a potential record IPO. Tesla and xAI have already collaborated in the past, for example, on integrating the AI chatbot Grok into vehicles.

(akn)