Tesla integrates Deepseek and Doubao AIs inside cars in China

Tesla is starting to integrate Deepseek and Doubao, two AIs competing with Elon Musk’s Grok, inside its cars in China.

Unlike Grok in cars in North America, AIs in China are going to be able to interact with car functions.

In the US, Tesla recently launched Grok, the large language model (LLM) developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, on its vehicles.

However, it is equivalent to having Grok on your phone, as it can’t interact with any of the vehicle’s functions.

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Now, Tesla is also adding LLMs to its vehicles in China, but it is utilizing local AI models rather than xAI’s.

According to new documents released on its website, Tesla is adding DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Doubao to its vehicles in China, starting with the new Model YL.

Tesla is partnering with ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud service to host both AI models.

DeepSeek will be used as a chatbot/voice assistant inside the vehicle, similar to how Tesla owners in the US can currently use Grok in their cars.

However, unlike Grok, Doubao will be able to interact with Tesla vehicles and replace voice commands with a new ‘Hey, Tesla’ wake-up word.

In China, AI models are increasingly common as standard voice command systems in electric vehicles, and Tesla is now catching up to the competition in this regard with this release.

Electrek’s Take

LLMs are becoming increasingly popular in new cars everywhere. We saw Volkswagen Group vehicles integrating ChatGPT, but in China, it is now virtually standard, even on less premium cars than Tesla.

Even though I don’t speak Chinese, I could see how smooth voice commands on cars were when I was in China two months ago, and how often drivers would use them.

Tesla needed to catch up here and it looks like due to regulations, it can’t use Grok.