Electric vehicle maker Tesla is set to host an Investor Day presentation at 3:00 local time in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. CEO Elon Musk promised to share his “Master Plan 3,” and to discuss how Tesla plans to scale up in the face of increasing competition.
Musk wrote in a tweet on Feb. 7, 2023, “Master Plan 3, the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth will be presented on March 1. The future is bright!”
His ambitious Master Plan Part Deux was published in 2016, and has not been completely fulfilled. It included four main objectives:
“Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage”
“Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments”
“Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning”
“Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it”
On Twitter, Tesla notified shareholders that its presentation will be available live on YouTube, where the company has traditionally streamed its events, but also on Twitter itself.
Musk acquired the San Francisco-based social media company for around $44 billion in October 2022, selling around $23 billion worth of his Tesla shares in part to finance the deal. He may reveal more details about how the two plan to work together moving forward.
As CNBC previously reported, Musk has authorized a myriad of Tesla, SpaceX and Boring Co. execs and engineers to work for him at Twitter.
Ahead of the 2023 Investor Day, at a press conference on Tuesday, Mexico president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tesla had agreed to build a large factory in Monterrey, Mexico. He said Tesla agreed to use recycled water and take other initiatives to cope with water-scarcity in the region.
The company is expected to reveal more about this and its other facilities, including its Shanghai plant, and the newer factories in Austin, Texas and outside of Berlin.
Investors are wondering whether and when Tesla will finally deliver a new, more affordable electric vehicle, and when the company may finally fulfill its longstanding promise of driverless technology.
In 2020, at a Tesla Battery Day event, Musk teased the possibility of both, saying: “About three years from now, we’re confident we can make a very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that’s also fully autonomous.”
Musk has been promising a truly self-driving car since 2016. The company still has not completed the cross-country, driverless demo Musk then said would be possible by the end of 2017.
In February, the federal vehicle safety regulators in the US and Tesla announced a voluntary recall of 362,758 vehicles. In a safety recall notice, Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned that the driver-assistance software, marketed as Full Self-Driving Beta, may cause Tesla vehicles to disobey traffic laws and could cause crashes. (The company plans to deliver a fix via an over-the-air software update.)
Despite the company’s delays on driverless tech, Tesla shares have rebounded from declines during 2022, and are up more than 60% for the year so far.
According to Ortex, a short interest tracker, “After delivering $4.5 billion in profits to short sellers in January, TSLA’s 19% rise in February has helped pile on losses for TSLA bears. ORTEX estimates that TSLA shorts incurred $3 billion in losses for February, the biggest short loss of the month by a meaningful margin (#2 was NVDA with a $1.5 billion loss for shorts).”
Mizuho Securities analysts maintained a buy rating on shares of Tesla ahead of Investor Day, seeing Tesla in a leadership position in a growing market for fully electric vehicles. They wrote, in a note earlier this week, “Near-term, we see continued strength in TSLA’s market share, but see cheaper competitor EVs coming to market as potentially dilutive to TSLA’s share of the US EV market.”
Currently, the lowest-priced Tesla available is the Model 3 sedan, which starts at a price point of around $43,000, they wrote. Seven models from other automakers are currently priced below that, Mizhuo noted.
Cannacord Genuity analysts ran a survey asking what Tesla watchers predict will be discussed during the Investor Day presentation on Wednesday. Most expected to hear about a “next-Gen vehicle platform,” as well as details on Tesla’s mining plans, and an update to Tesla’s longer-term vehicle volume forecast through 2030.
This story is developing, please check back for updates.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.
“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.
The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.
The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.
OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”
OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.