Confronting OpenAI, Musk Opens Source of Grok-1: Can He Save Tesla?

Elon Musk has fulfilled his promise by open-sourcing the large model Grok-1.

On the morning of March 18, Musk’s AI startup xAI announced that its large language model Grok-1 has been open-sourced and is available for public download on GitHub.

Contrastingly, Tesla’s stock has been declining. In just two days, Tesla’s market value decreased by approximately $47.9 billion, a total drop of 8.6%. As of the close of last Friday (March 15), Tesla’s stock price was $163.57, with a market value of about $517.53 billion, which is more than half below its peak trillion-dollar valuation.

Can Musk’s open-sourcing of Grok-1 have a positive impact on Tesla, and will investors be optimistic about Tesla because of this move?

Tesla’s market value has fallen nearly 35% within the year

Affected by the overall downturn in the U.S. stock market indexes due to unexpectedly high U.S. inflation data, and primarily due to its own short-term development slowdown.

In October 2021, Tesla’s stock price rose, surpassing a trillion dollars due to increasing global sales and strong technological competitiveness, along with a $4.2 billion electric vehicle order from Hertz. However, Tesla’s market value has significantly declined, evaporating about $400 billion from its peak value of $1.24 trillion in January 2022.

Despite a positive outlook from many investment banks at the end of last year, Tesla’s market value continued to fall due to slowed sales in the first quarter and doubts about the competitiveness of its affordable car model. Tesla’s market value dropped by $46.1 billion overnight on March 1, and nearly $48 billion more in the recent two trading days.

Is the affordable model coming too late?

Investment banks are pessimistic about Tesla’s short-term prospects, mainly due to overestimated production capacity for its affordable car models.

According to Bloomberg, analysts at Evercore ISI believe it could take years for Tesla to fully launch a new, lower-cost model, longer than Wall Street’s predictions. Elon Musk had announced plans for a $25,000 electric car based on a new platform, potentially launching globally in the first half of this year and going on sale by 2025.

Evercore analysts, after visiting Tesla’s Texas factory, believe the production estimates for the Model 2 are too high, likely reaching 500,000 units by 2026 rather than the million-plus expected by the market.

After Musk’s statement, Tesla’s stock price began to plummet, with some analysts predicting it could fall further to around $152 per share, a 14% decrease from the current price.

However, some investment banks remain optimistic about Tesla, with Wedbush analysts believing Tesla could still achieve a delivery target of 2.1 million vehicles this year and that AI and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology could push its market value back over one trillion dollars.

So how can investors buy Tesla?

To buy Tesla stocks, you need to open a US stock account. However, due to various reasons, it is very difficult for many Chinese investors to open a brokerage account. Here, the editor believes that we should choose a more credible brokerage for investment. For example, Jiaxin Wealth Management is a globally renowned investment brokerage. By opening an account with Jiaxin Wealth Management, you can get a bank account with the same name. You can deposit USDT into the multi-asset wallet BiyaPay and then withdraw fiat currency to Jiaxin Securities for investment in US stocks.

BiyaPay has been authorized by the US Securities Supervision Commission and has also launched a US stock investment business. You can also directly invest in US stocks on BiyaPay. Investors can search for Tesla’s stock code on the platform and buy Tesla’s stock. Investors can regularly monitor Tesla’s stock price according to their investment strategy and buy or sell Tesla’s stock at the appropriate time.

Can artificial intelligence technology Grok-1 save Tesla?

In the field of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving is considered a “sufficiently complex” problem that did not appear out of thin air; it is a gradual process of automating driving tasks, with many “tools artificial intelligence” in between. Elon Musk stated that Tesla is currently approaching the “final step” of its FSD (Full Self Driving) technology. This game-changing challenge is based on artificial intelligence-based “vehicle control” - the ability of cars to self-navigate in actual driving environments.

However, in order for AI to work, it must be based on a large model, which is a mode of Machine Learning. It may be used for object detection or face recognition, or for language recognition processing, just like the popular ChatGPT, which is a model of Natural-language Understanding. In addition, large models also have modal characteristics, which can be input through various information methods. Speech, text, visual information, etc. can all be received and learned by machines, which is of great significance for driving.

Now that Musk has open-sourced Glock-1, does that mean he has confidence in achieving fully autonomous driving?

It is reported that Grok-1 is a hybrid expert model with 314 billion parameters, of which 25% of the parameters can be activated for specific data units (tokens). It is much higher than the parameter size of the ChatGPT 3.5 model (generally considered to be 175 billion).

Perhaps it is these hard powers that give Musk the confidence to say at the artificial intelligence conference: Tesla believes that we are very close to fully autonomous driving without human intervention. We have tested it on roads in the US and now rarely require human intervention. Therefore, when I drive a Tesla using the latest FSD fully autonomous driving beta technology system, the journey from point A to point B basically does not require too much human control. This is just a speculation, but I think achieving fully autonomous driving, or fully autonomous driving from L4 to L5, may be achieved later this year.

Have we really reached the final stage? Perhaps Musk has been promising full autonomous driving for years.

Let’s wait and see.