Elon Musk on Tuesday said he doesn’t see Nvidia’s new self-driving tools as a problem for Tesla right after the latter’s CEO Jensen Huang introduced Alpamayo at CES in Vegas.
The Alpamayo system is supposed to help cars think like people, but Elon didn’t sound impressed. An X user compared it to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, and Elon replied that it’ll take “many years” before any system beats a human behind the wheel.
“The legacy car companies won’t design the cameras and AI computers into their cars at scale until several years after that,” Elon responded in a post. “So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer.”
Elon throws shade while Jensen stays polite
Elon didn’t just brush it off once. In another post, he said Nvidia will find it “easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.” That 1% at the end? That’s where everyone’s been stuck.
Jensen, though, always keeps it friendly. During a Q&A, he called Tesla’s FSD stack “world-class” and “state-of-the-art.” But he also pointed out the difference. “Our system is really quite pervasive because we’re a technology platform provider. That’s the primary difference,” he said.
Translation: Nvidia gives the software to car companies. Tesla builds the cars.
Tesla already has a small robotaxi service in Austin. There’s also one in San Francisco, but there’s still a driver in the car. Elon said last August they’re training a new FSD model. He’s been talking about self-driving cars for years. It’s still supervised. But they’re testing it.
Long history, joint deals, and billions at stake
Back in 2016, nobody cared about Nvidia’s DGX-1 supercomputer except for the nerdy Elon. He [famously] was the first buyer, and Jensen delivered it himself, sealing what seems to be a decade-long friendship as of 2026.
Back then, Jensen once said Elon is the “ultimate GPU” because of how fast he handles big projects. Elon liked his work ethic and called it “hardcore.”
That same DGX-1 machine became part of OpenAI’s early research, and then Tesla used Nvidia’s chips in the first version of its FSD computer.
Jensen once said he regrets not giving Elon more funding for xAI, so now Nvidia is backing it, building a giant data center called Colossus II for xAI, packed with Nvidia GPUs.
The two boys are also working on a huge project in Saudi Arabia with a local startup called Humain AI, something Cryptopolitan previously reported live.
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