Elon Musk is determined to unify his empire. After SpaceX’s purchase of xAI, it has now announced a joint project between Tesla and its artificial intelligence company. It is the AI agent MACROHARD, and before going into details, let’s go with what is most important for Musk himself: it is a mockery of Microsoft and a software that wants to emulate the functioning of entire companies.
Also something that no other company can do right now. According to Elon, of course.
MACROHARD. If Microsoft is “small soft”, MACROHARD is “huge hard”. Elon Musk with his usual things, but beyond the joke, the project is an umbrella that unites the capabilities of Grok and those of Digital Optimus. Grok is the conductor, xAI’s large language model that calls the shots thanks to its “deep understanding of the world.”
Digital Optimus is the executing “arm”, the software that manages the execution of a task in real time. From what Musk has stated, it is a vitamin agent, something in which the American industry, and China, is putting all its efforts. Also with General Artificial Intelligence, but that is another story.
like a brain. The tycoon has compared the operation of the agent with the theory of dual processing of the brain. While Grok is the one who sets the reason, the pause and the intention, Digital Optimus is the one who carries out the instinctive action, whatever that means. If we put it better, Grok has the knowledge as he is an LLM and Digital Optimus is the one who executes the action.
As? Well, being able to “process the last five seconds of what appears on a computer screen and execute actions with the keyboard and mouse in real time. If you want to know more about how it works, you will have to wait because in Musk’s message there is not much more to say about this. Basically, he has described an agent like those that xAI’s competitors are already working on, but Musk claims that it can “simulate all the operations of a company.”
“It’s a funny reference to Microsoft” – Elon Musk
Chip AI4. The most interesting thing about MACROHARD is that part of “hardware” that can also give rise to the name. Tesla and xAI have been working on their own chips for some time that allow them to better train AI and more optimal inference. After abandoning its chip project a few months ago, this 2026 Tesla rescued it and noted that they were making enormous progress.
Maybe not yet to train the model with heavy load, something that NVIDIA chips are largely responsible for (because NVIDIA is involved in all AI companies, large or small), but for that inference task. And that’s where this Tesla and xAI project has a key advantage. The agent is designed to run on Tesla’s AI4 chip along with “relatively sparing use of NVIDIA’s already much more expensive xAI hardware.”
The key is that the AI4 is much cheaper than NVIDIA’s solutions and is also the ‘home-made’ solution, allowing Tesla and xAI to scale the system as far as they want. As long as TSMC, which is the company that manufactures them, has bandwidth, we already know who the two main clients are in case of a bottleneck.
Revived project. And it is also curious that, like the project of its own chips, MACROHARD has been rescued from the underworld in which it was. Days before Musk revealed the project, Business Insider noted that the agent had stalled due to factors such as a hiring freeze and the departure of key engineers such as Toby Pohlen, a founding member of xAI who was going to lead the project, but who left the company two weeks later.
Perhaps with that part of it being a system powered by its own and cheap chips, what Musk says that “no other company can do it yet” is fulfilled, but it will not be because they are not trying. Outside the long shadow of NVIDIA, OpenAI continues to develop its own chips with Broadcom. And Meta, after some lurches, is also preparing chips for inference.
Photo by Planet Labs
Now all that remains is to see less talk and something tangible about MACROHARD’s capabilities and whether, being under the Tesla umbrella, the project comes to fruition. And one last curiosity: MACROHARD is how Elon baptized the Colossus 2 data center… with which he already laughed at Microsoft.
Imágenes | Sherwood, Gage Skidmore
In WorldOfSoftware | Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is not exactly the best place to get objective information. ChatGPT doesn’t care
