Beyond the Narrative

Tesla, SpaceX, autonomy & AI. Long-term bullish.
I admire Musk, but think for myself.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

Tesla hit $1 trillion in 2021. Then it lost more than 70% of its value.

Was it a ridiculous bubble — or was the market simply five years early? https://t.co/urC03ReWYP

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@AndyL5cc Sharing what you’ve learned helps others avoid the mistakes you made. That’s the value you give outward.

Iteration happens inward — your content, judgment, methods, and style.

One makes others better. The other makes you uniquely you.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@WangNextDoor2 No 😂 No source. Just reasoning.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

I think Cybercab is different. Tesla can’t afford to let a critical material shortage constrain production. Every Cybercab that can’t be built means lost revenue for Tesla or a third-party fleet operator. That’s why supply-chain resilience seems to be built into the vehicle from day one.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

Rare-earth-free motors. In-house cathode material. Local lithium refining.

These look like separate engineering decisions. I don’t think they are.

Cybercab is being designed for a world where autonomy is no longer the bottleneck — scale is.

Tesla cannot afford to have Cybercab production constrained by a critical material or a vulnerable supply chain. For Tesla, every vehicle that can’t be built means lost recurring revenue. For third-party fleet operators, it means a revenue-generating asset they can’t put on the road.

That changes how you design the car from the beginning. Materials, components, manufacturing processes and supply chains all have to be considered through the same lens: what could stop us from scaling?

Cybercab isn’t just being designed to be cheap to build. It’s being designed to be hard to stop building.

[Robotaxi @robotaxi]

First Cybercab made using our in-house cathode material – from the first cathode plant in the Americas

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@robotaxi For Model 3 and Y, a supply constraint delays a sale. For Cybercab, it delays recurring revenue.

That makes supply-chain independence far more important when the product itself is a revenue-generating asset.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

I completely agree.
Super agents have almost no room to exist in China’s current internet ecosystem. It’s not that the technology isn’t there. The tech giants simply won’t allow an outside agent to sit between them and their users. The Doubao phone is already a perfect real-world example of why.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@wholemars Definitely human.
Absolument humain.
Definitivamente humano.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

I feel this too. Every car brand has its own tribe, and somehow it’s much easier for these tribes to attack each other than to simply coexist.

Liking a car has become loaded with far too many labels that have nothing to do with the car itself.

Choose what you like. Support what you believe in. Nothing wrong with that.

Just keep some boundaries. Your choice doesn’t necessarily make you wiser or better than someone who chose differently. That’s all.

[JK @jeffreykWNDR]

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul."

Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work.
A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept.

They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded.

This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix.

What I Learned From Walt Disney

In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.

We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.

That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.

A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did.

Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”

A Distinction With a Difference

I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . .

Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new.

Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.

Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.

One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable.

Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground.

A Path Forward

In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . .

Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human.

At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.

The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it.

There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us.

The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities.

What I See Coming Soon

As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.

Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

There’s a paradox here.

Cybercab gets another revenue stream by contributing compute, making it even more attractive to fleet operators. But the better it gets at carrying passengers, the less idle compute time it has.

The ideal solution: Starlink + intelligent scheduling.

Dynamically allocate compute between mobility and inference as demand changes.

One fleet. Two revenue streams. One scheduling problem.

[Tesla Owners Silicon Valley @teslaownersSV]

Elon Musk: Now we’re going to look at the computer for the Cybercab. The computer will be somewhat overspecified, but I think there’s a major opportunity here.

Similar to Amazon Web Services, if the car is driving for 50 hours a week, that leaves more than 100 hours where the compute is sitting there unused.

You could use that idle compute for distributed inference.

If you have a fleet of 100 million vehicles, each with roughly a kilowatt of efficient inference compute, that’s about 100 GW of compute. That’s a massive amount of compute. And if it’s already there, you might as well use it.

I think that makes a lot of sense. The autonomous future is here.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@teslaownersSV Great idea. Cybercab could earn from compute on top of passenger fares.

But there’s a catch: the better it gets at being a Robotaxi, the less idle compute time it has.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@AndyL5cc The tough job market is pushing students to think ahead.

Whether they end up working a regular job or building something of their own, college is probably the cheapest place to experiment — and to fail.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

This feels like a fascinating intersection between a general-purpose model and the physical world.

It can understand its surroundings, recognize what’s happening, learn from mistakes, and improve — and somehow, it can actually drive a car.

No one specifically taught it how to drive this car.

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@wellzhiai X is fun. You can quickly find people who are into the same things, and the community vibe is great.

And I’m really enjoying the feeling of building from zero. Though yeah, it gets a little stressful sometimes. 😂

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@mylifeonmystyle You are Superman!

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@himulikj94204 Happy birthday 🎂

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@WangNextDoor2 Exactly!

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

@kenw_2 More wealth doesn’t automatically mean universal high income.

If AI and robots create most of the wealth, the harder question is: who owns the machines, and who gets the wealth they create?

[Beyond the Narrative @Riverwindview]

What if Musk is right about 100 billion humanoid robots — but wrong about universal high income?

I can imagine the first part happening.

Ten or twenty years from now, advances in AI, chips, batteries, actuators and manufacturing could push humanoid robots across two critical thresholds: technical capability and economic viability.

They become capable enough to do real work — and cheap enough to deploy at massive scale.

If that happens, productivity could explode.

Robots don’t sleep. They don’t get tired. They can work around the clock. As their manufacturing and operating costs fall, society could produce vastly more goods and services with far less human labor.

Musk takes this one step further.

He believes this abundance will eventually lead to universal high income, and that money itself may become far less important.

This is where I think the real problem begins.

Today, most people earn wealth in two basic ways: labor or capital.

Some sell physical labor.

Others sell knowledge, skills, judgment or creativity — doctors, lawyers, engineers, researchers, artists.

And some earn returns by owning capital.

AI and humanoid robots could disrupt the first two at the same time.

Robots replace physical labor.
AI replaces part of intellectual labor.
Put them together, and machines can take on an increasingly large share of human work.

But there is a crucial difference:

The robots still belong to someone.

Imagine one person owns 10,000 robots, each generating economic value 24/7.

Another person owns none — while the labor he used to sell is now worth less because robots can do much of it.

Society may be dramatically richer.

But these two people are not necessarily richer together.

In fact, during the transition, the opposite could happen: the more productive the machines become, the more valuable ownership of those machines becomes.

That means the path from a productivity explosion to universal high income needs another mechanism.

Redistribution through taxes and public services is one possibility. Broader ownership of productive capital, social wealth funds, or some form of AI and robot dividend are others.

I don’t know which model will work.

But I think this will become one of the biggest questions of the AI and robotics era:

If machines create most of the wealth, who owns the machines — and who gets the wealth they create?

Technology may eventually solve much of the problem of scarcity.

Distribution is a different problem.

[Ken W @kenw_2]

世界首富马斯克最近接受了央视采访，大力称赞了中国人民在国家领导人的带领下实现了生活水平的极大提升，特斯拉的成功离不开中国工厂和人民，中国非常的amazing大家都要来看看。

马斯克还重点预测了人形机器人的未来。在10年内，地球上的人形机器人会达到10亿只，每三到四年就会增长10倍，15年后数量达到100亿只，20年后达到1000亿只，比人类的数量多得多。

马斯克坚信，人类拥有AI和人形机器人后，生产力极大提升，收入也会极大提升，到时候钱就不重要了，大家都有钱。