Full verbatim transcript — Elon Musk, Tesla 2025 Shareholders Meeting, Austin, TX (Nov 6):

And this is really necessary for the car to—like with AI4, I think we can get to 200 or 300 percent better than human safety, maybe 400 percent better. But with AI5, I think we can do 1,000 percent better or maybe even better than that than human safety. So at a point, actually, it might be too much intelligence for a car.

So, like, I was thinking, what if you get stuck in a car and you have too much intelligence? But then one of the things we could do is when the car is idle is use the car as a massive distributed AI inference fleet.

So with the concerned customers, we’re like, do you want your car to earn money for you while it’s sitting in your garage at night? I don’t know.

We’ll pay $100 a month or $200 a month or whatever the right number is. If you allow Tesla to do AI inference workloads when you’re not using your car.

So that will also help the AI in the car not get bored. Because, like, I sort of imagined, like, what if I got stuck in a car? You know? And then—well and the highlight of your day was driving. It’s like, you know—but they don’t always want to drive.

Distributed AI Inference and Future Computing Power

So then what do you do the rest of the time? So I think Tesla could actually end up having the largest—Tesla might end up having the most amount of AI inference compute in the world. Like, if you think, maybe if we had one hundred million car fleet, and at some point, we may have more than one hundred million car fleet, and they’ll have AI six, AI seven, you know.

And if you’re able to run a kilowatt of inference on a one hundred million car fleet, now you’ve got one hundred gigawatts of distributed inference with built-in cooling and power electronics and distributed power.

Probably the market is valuing that as zero right now is my guess. But it seems like an obvious thing to do. If you’ve got distributed inference AI and you’ve got the power and the cooling, which is very difficult to do the power and the cooling, and one hundred gigawatts is a lot. I mean, the average power consumption in the U.S., I think, is around four hundred sixty gigawatts—that’s the entire electrical consumption of the U.S.

So if you do it at one hundred gigawatts, that would be a pretty big number. But, yeah, it’s basically something is a limiting factor, and then we take actions to address the limiting factor.

Elon Musk, verbatim, Tesla 2025 Shareholders Meeting, Austin, TX (Nov 6)