No Wheel, No Problem - Tesla's Robotaxi Recap

Welcome, AI entrepreneurs & enthusiasts.

Elon Musk just unveiled Tesla's $30k driverless Robotaxi, a surprise 20-person Robovan, and made bold claims about Optimus—all without a steering wheel in sight.

With prices this low and ambitions this high, are we witnessing the birth of a truly driverless era? Let's get into it…

In today’s AI news:

• Elon Musk and Tesla unveil Robotaxi
• AMD reveals next-gen AI chips
• OpenAI’s new AI agent benchmark
• More AI & tech news

Elon Musk and Tesla unveil Robotaxi

The News: Elon Musk just unveiled Tesla's long-awaited Robotaxi, a futuristic two-door vehicle with gull-wing doors and no steering wheel or pedals, alongside surprise announcements for a larger Robovan and updates on the Optimus humanoid robot.

The details:

• The "Cybercab" Robotaxi is set for production in 2026, priced under $30,000, with operating costs projected at 20 cents per mile.
• Tesla's autonomous approach relies on AI, cameras, and extensive training data, eschewing the lidar hardware favored by competitors.
• A larger self-driving Robovan was also (unexpectedly) introduced, which is reportedly capable of carrying up to 20 people.
• Musk projects a future $20,000-$30,000 price range for Tesla Optimus robots, boldly claiming they'll be "the biggest product ever of any kind."

Why it matters: After years of hype, Tesla’s long-awaited, fully autonomous Robotaxi has finally been revealed — and it’s coming in HOT at an affordable price of under $30,000. With the cost of autonomous transport being so low, the Robotaxi and Robovan (when fully rolled out) could completely revolutionize transportation.

AMD reveals next-gen AI chips

The News: AMD just launched its new lineup of AI-focused processors at the company’s Advancing AI 2024 event, showing off a range of releases aimed at competing with rivals Nvidia and Intel in the booming data center and AI chip market.

The details:

• AMD unveiled the Ryzen AI PRO 300 enterprise-focused processors for AI PCs, touting 40% better performance than Intel's Core Ultra chips.
• The Instinct MI325X AI accelerator, set to begin production in late 2024, boasts 1.8x higher memory capacity and 1.3x more bandwidth than Nvidia's H200 GPU.
• The chipmaker revealed EPYC 5th Gen CPUs, which CEO Lisa Su called ‘the world’s best for enterprise, AI, and cloud.’
• AMD also announced plans for annual AI chip releases, with the MI350X slated for late 2025 and the MI400 for 2026.

Why it matters: There seems to be no end in sight to the rapid acceleration of powerful AI processors —?and while AMD is making an aggressive push against its competitors, there is likely more than enough demand for everyone (including both Jensen Huang and his cousin Lisa Su).

OpenAI’s new AI agent benchmark

The News: OpenAI just introduced MLE-bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate how well AI agents perform on real-world machine learning engineering tasks using Kaggle competitions.

The details:

• MLE-bench consists of 75 curated Kaggle competitions, covering a range of ML tasks like model training, data preparation, and experimentation.
• Kaggle competitions are online challenges where data scientists compete to solve complex problems using machine learning for prizes and recognition.
• In research, the AI models often succeeded in applying standard techniques but struggled with tasks requiring adaptability or creative problem-solving.
• The best-performing setup, OpenAI's o1-preview model with AIDE scaffolding, achieved at least a bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions.

Why it matters: AI agents are coming in hot — and new benchmarks are necessary to evaluate capabilities that blow past previous testing measures. Between OpenAI’s commentary, a flurry of startups pushing agentic capabilities, and new benchmarks being created, the AI agent revolution feels ready to explode.

Trending AI Tools

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• Echo - AI voice and text notes to organize thoughts and bring them to life

QUICK HITS

Chinese researchers unveiled Pyramid Flow, a new open-source AI video generation model capable of creating high-quality, 10-second clips using a new ‘pyramidal flow matching’ technique.

OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor's AI startup Sierra is reportedly set to raise hundreds of millions in funding at a valuation of over $4B for its conversational enterprise AI agents.

Japanese AI startup Rhymes released Aria, hailed as the first open-source multimodal native Mixture-of-Experts model — offering SOTA performance across various tasks with a lightweight 3.9B parameters and 64k token context window.

Wondercraft launched a new ‘Director Mode’ feature, allowing users to control AI voices with natural language instructions and becoming the first audio platform to integrate OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode.

Google rolled out its Imagen 3 image generator to all Gemini users, though only Advanced subscribers ($19.99/mo) can generate images of people.

Walmart revealed new AI platforms to create hyper-personalized shopping experiences, including its Wallaby LLMs trained on the company’s data and a Customer Support Assistant that can take actions for the user.

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