Tesla wants to monetize its cars to process AI workloads | Hacker News Reader

Tesla wants to monetize its cars to process AI workloads

theregister.com

15 pointssausajez10 comments

So my car can crash ("crash" in car terms, not in software terms) because someone wrote a tricky prompt? I try to avoid profanity, but that idea seems like it deserves some.

And, whose car is it? Mine, or Musk's? If I bought it, it better be mine. If it's Musk's, he can pay for it. But if it's mine, it better not be running some non-car-related workload on its computers without my permission.

> CFO Vaibhav Taneja, said "the capex is shared by the entire world. Sort of everyone owns a small chunk, and they get a small profit out of it maybe."

Maybe. What that will turn into is like smart tvs: pay extra to avoid this "feature".

They'll be serving you ads first, I bet.

Reading about all the stuff happening at Tesla, I feel like I'm watching a movie made by people who were high on crack cocaine, working off a deranged script authored by hallucinatory LLMs that were secretly running amok in Tesla vehicles. Every scene seems more unhinged than the last.

One way to tell if someone is smarter than you is if they are continually taking actions that appear stupid to you, yet which keep working out for them for reasons that appear like luck.

This also reliably works for people who are obscenely rich and well connected regardless of any other factor.

Anyway, there's nothing mysterious about the success potential of being a grifter. If it weren't so, the world would have far fewer grifters in it.

ridiculous. if personal success was locked to 'smarts' the world's landscape of rich would look vastly different.

here's an even more inconvenient truth for you, and this one is short enough to embroider on a pillow : "it's not what you know, it's who you know."

I think we can confidently call stupid actions stupid actions. Inertia from prior success can keep them from being company-ending actions, especially if they can be corrected once they are recognized as stupid (or once the people who knew they were stupid from the beginning can gather enough political clout).

Tesla has smart people, just like any tech company, but they're not uniquely smart and they're not immune to the same short-sighted thinking that plagues other tech companies.

Note that I think this particular idea is not necessarily bad for the company, it's just not anything special. It's basically Folding@Home, monetized. If you can convince enough people to leave it on (or force it on and somehow avoid legal/PR issues) then I guess you can save a tiny bit of money on certain kinds of workloads.

I mean, sometimes a stupid thing is just a stupid thing.

Could be. Even if few of Musk's decisions make sense to me, he has proven a lot of people wrong in the past, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The jury is out.

Might as well just mine Bitcoin.

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