Sam's Checkmate: How Open Source AI and Silicon Valley Kingmakers dethroned the OpenAI emperor! Plus, Tesla's API Apocalypse has arrived.
Full Episode
This is Coder Radio, episode 599 for December 10th, 2024. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupiter Broadcasting's weekly talk show. It's taking a pragmatic look at the art and the business of software and the whole gosh darn world of technology and everything else in there. My name is Chris, probably, and our host, I know that, his name is Mike. Hello, Mike. Hello, hello, hello. How are you?
I'm all right. I'm all right. I got a fired up email this morning from a very disgruntled listener. He wasn't mad at us for a change, though. That was good. But he turned me on to the situation going on over at Tesla. I guess he writes an app, I guess, that you can install on your Tesla car. And there's a big change happening where I guess he just had free access to the API in the past.
Then last year they released documentation kind of like making the API seem official. And then this week they've now announced that the APIs in the Tesla system are going to be pay per use and they're massive fees. And you have to pay per vehicle. And some developers with their current API usage would be looking at millions of dollars annually in fees.
So there's this developer that makes this app called Tessie. He's looking at $60 million under the new system. And so the guy that I heard from, he's just going to have to stop using it altogether. He's just done. Other people are going to try to break it and use unofficial APIs. Other people will try to bypass it by connecting over Bluetooth and doing things that way.
There's a developer of an app called StatsApp for Tesla. He says it's totally unsustainable for any independent developer. The BetterRoutePlanner developer faces similar challenges, saying he's probably going to have to drop Tesla support entirely. It's a lot like... Well, it kind of reminds me of the moves around Twitter's APIs, and it reminds me of the changes around Reddit.
Very, very similar to what he did with Twitter, right? Yeah. It feels like that to me. I don't know. It... Is it a rug pull if they were never like super official? Rug pull is the word I want to use, but I don't know if that's fair.
You know, is it a rug pull? I don't know. I mean, they weren't official, right? They were kind of just there. I don't think, at least I couldn't find anything where Tesla came out and said that they were going to support these APIs. Yeah. For third-party use.
Well, they launched documentation, but it was kind of vague. At first, people started using it before there was documentation. Right. That was the gist I got. I mean, clearly, they're trying to monetize their API, right? Yeah. But... Yeah, but that's crazy, though, because the software platform of the Teslas is supposed to be one of the value adds.
And then, you know, having a rich app ecosystem could be potentially badass, especially if some of them are giving you cool stats or helping you find better places to charge. Yeah. That's value-add that Tesla doesn't have to bring. All they have to do is make the API available.
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