Investor Ross Gerber says Tesla is 'behind everyone now'
Although this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has given all the A-List tech companies a chance to launch new products to considerable hype, the buzziest news coming out of the consumer tech conference has arguably come from Nvidia (NVDA).
The chip giant has unveiled numerous new offerings, including its forthcoming Rubin platform, which has six new chips designed for one AI supercomputer.
The company also introduced new open models, frameworks and AI infrastructure for generalist robotics, alongside the debut of new AI robots from companies across numerous industries that are utilizing the Nvidia robotics stack.
And Nvidia also announced the launch of Alpamayo, which is a suite of open AI models, simulation tools and datasets that it says will help accelerate the next era of safe, reasoning-based autonomous vehicle (AV) development.
“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here – when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions.”
Nvidia's push into robotics and the ramping up of its efforts in the AV space could put increased pressure on Elon Musk, who is aggressively aiming to have Tesla (TSLA) dominate both sectors.
In fact, Musk appeared to shrug off Nvidia's introduction of Apamayo in a reply to a post on X about the launch.
"Well that's just exactly what Tesla is doing," he said. "What they will find is that it's easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of distribution."
Musk's foray into politics was a setback for Tesla
However, Ross Gerber, co-founder and CEO/CIO of wealth management firm Gerber Kawasaki, was more impressed with Nvidia's new AI models for AV development than Musk.
"The fact that the Nvidia autonomous systems use vision AND radar to create safety redundancy is the correct hardware setup," he said in a post on X. "At some point Tesla will adapt or continue to fall further behind."
Gerber, who was an early investor in Tesla, added that if Tesla "fixed the hardware and mapping issues, the software is way better and they could take the lead again."
But he was also impressed with the debut of Nvidia's new robotics offerings, noting that the "next stage of creating Nvidia brains for robotics will increase manufacturing productivity for a long time into the future."
And while Gerber said that he "couldn't be more bullish on the future for technology and innovation" after watching all the new products being unveiled at CES, he had a damning assessment of where Musk and Tesla measure up with their rivals.
"Where does Tesla fit in this," Gerber said on X. "They are behind everyone now. Elon's year off in government gave the competition time to catch up."
"They have and in some cases surpassed Tesla's technology advantage," Gerber added. "Now it's a race..".
This isn't the first time that Gerber has been critical of Musk's foray into politics. When Musk was in the midst of his DOGE initiative back in April, Gerber called on Tesla to oust him in an interview with Business Insider.
"With Tesla, it's simple,” Gerber said. “You get another face of Tesla. It could be anybody, any CEO, somebody who's in the middle, who is a great communicator, who refocuses people on what Tesla really does.”
Although Gerber was a longtime backer of Tesla, he has become more bearish on the company in recent years, as Business Insider reported.
"The year that Elon took off from Tesla really cost Tesla a year," he said.
For his part, Musk expressed some regret about his work with the Trump administration during a podcast interview last month.
"I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically worked on my companies," he said. "And they wouldn't have been burning the cars."