Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q3 2023 Results Conference Call October 18, 2023 5:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Martin Viecha - VP, IR
Elon Musk - CEO
Vaibhav Taneja - CFO
Karn Budhiraj - VP, Supply Chain
Lars Moravy - VP, Vehicle Engineering
Conference Call Participants
Will Stein - Truist
Pierre Ferragu - New Street Research
Rod Lache - Wolfe Research
George Gianarikas - Canaccord
Colin Langan - Wells Fargo
Elon Musk
[Call Starts Abruptly] new factories and we believe there’s still meaningful room for improvement there.
Regarding Autopilot and AI, our vehicles now driven over 0.5 billion miles with FSD beta, full self-driving beta and that number is growing rapidly. We recently completed a 10,000 GPU cluster of H100s. We think probably bring it into operation faster than anyone’s ever brought that much compute per unit time into production, since training is the fundamental limiting factor on progress with full self-driving and vehicle autonomy.
We’re also seeing significant promise with FSD version 12. This is the end-to-end AI where it’s photon count in, controls out. Really you can think of it as there’s just a large bitstream coming in and a tiny bitstream going out, compressing reality into a very small set of outputs, which is actually kind of how humans work. The vast majority of human data input is optics from our eyes. And so, we are like the car photons in, controls out with neural nets, just neural nets in the middle. So, interesting to think about that.
We’ll continue to invest significantly in AI development, as this is really the mass game changer. And I mean success in this regard in the long-term I think has the potential to make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far. If you have fully autonomous cars at scale and fully autonomous humanoid robots that are truly useful, it’s not clear what the limit is.
Regarding energy storage, we deployed all gigawatt hours of energy of storage products in Q3. And as this business grows, the energy vision is becoming our highest margin business. Energy and service now contribute over $0.5 billion to quarterly profit.
The Cybertruck, I know a lot of people are excited about the Cybertruck. I am too. I’ve driven the car. It’s an amazing product. I do want to emphasize that there will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with the Cybertruck, and then in making a Cybertruck cash flow positive. This is simply normal for when you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any new vehicle, brand new vehicle program, but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale. So, I just don’t want to emphasize that while I think this is potentially our best product ever and I think it is our best product ever, it is going to be -- require immense work to reach volume production and be cash flow positive at a price that people can afford.