Phil Beisel
Ex-Apple, ex-Rivian (tech team founder). Silicon Valley.
Disruption happens. Optimism ahead.
Projects
NetP
Measure, understand, and explore network connectivity.
Articles on XAll articles →
Starlink: The Ultimate Wireless Network
A personal history of wireless networking, from AppleTalk in 1984 to Wi-Fi, cellular and the iPhone era. It ends with Starlink, which Phil argues will shape the future of the Internet and could carry most of the world’s IP traffic.
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NetP and Starlink
How NetP treats Starlink as a special ISP, for both direct terminals and upstream connections such as airline Wi-Fi. The goal is the broadest catalog of Starlink connectivity and the people using it.
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NetP, the app
An overview of NetP, the iPhone and Android app that measures the performance of any connection: Wi-Fi, cellular, Ethernet or satellite. It covers speed, bandwidth and latency, Places and Regions, Connections and recordings.
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NetP: Top 10 Things to Do
A quick-start list for NetP: set up a profile, try the Maps interface, visit a Place, record a journey and connect to Starlink, even on a flight. It finishes with Connection Snapshots, sharing and inviting friends.
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Why Starlink Could Handle Over 90% of Internet Traffic
Starlink carries just under 1% of global Internet traffic today, so Elon’s >90% claim sounds insane. Phil explains the two forces that could get it there: organic growth, and Starmind, a compute fabric in space that would use Starlink as its conduit to Earth.
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The Future Device
The smartphone, a flat piece of glass, is on its way to no longer being the primary computing device. Phil argues its successor will be neither AI glasses nor a new wearable, but Tesla’s Optimus.
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SpaceX: The Cost of Leaving Earth
Written on the eve of the SpaceX IPO, a look at the company’s history, from the Russia trip to Falcon 9 reusability, Starlink and Starship. The story is not really about rockets; it is about the economics of making space affordable.
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SpaceX's Teraspace Plan (+Tesla)
A follow-up that maps Tesla onto the Teraspace plan. Tesla brings silicon design (AI5 for Earth, D3 for orbit), Gigafactory-scale manufacturing via Terafab, and demand from FSD and Optimus.
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SpaceX's Teraspace Plan
SpaceX is in the business of scale. The Teraspace plan layers connectivity, compute, manufacturing and energy, each one expanding what space can do for people on Earth.
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The Magic of Optimus, part 2 (Data edition)
Language models learned from what humanity wrote down; Optimus can capture what has never been measured. Phil describes it as a new class of data engine and a discovery engine for physical-world AI.
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Data— The Lifeblood of AI
Chapter 15 of the book AI Rising, written by Phil. It looks at why data is both indispensable and definitional for modern AI, and how algorithms and compute turn raw inputs into predictions.
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The Magic of Optimus, part 1
Tesla’s Optimus as the moment intelligence leaves the screen and enters the physical world at scale. The first in a series on the technology behind it, from silicon and dexterity to vertical integration and manufacturing.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 9 (Reasoning edition)
Explores what “reasoning” means for Tesla’s FSD v14, how it could show up in real-world driving, and how it could extend to Optimus.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 8 (Optimus edition)
Tesla is applying the vision-based architecture behind FSD, from training to its own inference silicon, to Optimus, building one unified stack for its embodied AI.
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The Future of FSD Data
FSD data does more than train autonomy: it will improve the Robotaxi experience and unlock new real-world AI uses that Tesla begins tapping in the years ahead.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 7 (v14 edition)
Walks through Tesla’s end-to-end FSD training pipeline, from fleet-scale driving data to fine-tuning, and what it means for the coming version 14.
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The Magic of FSD
An index of Phil’s 9-part series on how Tesla FSD works.
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Inference Compute is Going to Explode!
Why inference, AI in everyday use, is where compute growth is concentrating, driven by existing uses and new edge and autonomous-system applications.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 6 (Robotaxi edition)
A look at Tesla’s Robotaxi service a month after its June 22, 2025 launch in Austin, including the geofence expansion and the first unsupervised version of FSD.
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Robotaxi: What's Next
Phil reflects on Robotaxi’s quiet June 22, 2025 launch in Austin as a landmark moment, and on what comes next for the service.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 5
Tesla’s FSD nears unsupervised operation with the June Robotaxi trial in Austin. This part digs into comments from Elon Musk and FSD VP Ashok Elluswamy on Tesla’s Q1 earnings call.
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Robotaxi Rodeo: Austin City Limits
A month before Robotaxi’s Austin go-live, a look at what is about to unfold within the city limits and where it goes from there.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 4
Zooms in on how FSD works, for the curious, about two months before the Robotaxi trial in Austin where unsupervised FSD is at the heart of it all.
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The New Vehicle Tech
Phil’s first article, originally published on Substack in February 2024. It starts from EVs as the future of automotive, with adoption accelerating.
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The Coming Humanoid Robot Revolution
Phil’s second article, originally on Substack in March 2024: walking, talking robots are about to arrive, starting in manufacturing and eventually reaching homes and offices.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 3
With the Austin Robotaxi trial and likely FSD v14 on the way, part 3 goes deeper on FSD, ties up loose ends and previews what’s next.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD, part 2
Tesla is on the brink of autonomy on four wheels (self-driving vehicles) and two legs (Optimus). FSD is already in cars today and will soon power Robotaxi.
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Robotaxi Drive-by
Robotaxi’s scale and cost dynamics could dismantle personal car ownership, transit and urban planning: a complete overhaul of transportation economics, not just Uber with better margins.
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Tesla and SpaceX are going to collide!
Tesla and SpaceX are on a collision course, and that’s a good thing. Explores the synergies building between them, starting from SpaceX’s background and products.
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The Tesla Optimus Network
Examines Optimus as a networked device, and why ubiquitous high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet helps make it the next product to surpass the smartphone.
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Tesla Optimus, the Next Big Thing
Phil argues the next revolutionary breakthrough after the PC and the smartphone is the humanoid robot, specifically Tesla’s Optimus.
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Data Driven!
A deep dive into Phil’s career-long obsession with data, why he is so data-driven, and the value of that mindset in the age of AI.
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The Future Should Look Like the Future
As 2024 closes, Phil takes a stab at forecasting what the future might bring, building on a year of technology articles.
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Tesla FSD and the Hyper-Connected Car
What it means to have a truly connected car, always online over a high-speed link, with a focus on Tesla FSD and Phil’s time on Rivian’s Connected Car team.
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Tesla Optimus: I know what I see
Today’s AI assistants learn mostly from text, an incomplete proxy for real knowledge and a limit on reaching AGI. The article looks at what that means for Tesla Optimus.
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Starlink is Mind Blowing!
Phil’s research notes on how Starlink works: high-speed Internet almost anywhere, from planes to remote areas, and why that matters when ground infrastructure fails.
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Phil's Articles
An index of Phil’s technology articles.
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Engineering a Car
After Tesla’s We, Robot event, a look at the process of engineering a car, one of the hardest engineering-to-product efforts, drawing on Phil’s six years at Rivian.
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Optimus: ME, ROBOT
Ahead of Tesla’s October 10 “We, Robot” event, why the name, and whether Optimus will be on the agenda as Tesla’s future centers on autonomous robots.
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Accelerated Computing
Explains accelerated computing, computing on massive datasets through parallelism, and the rise of NVIDIA and the “ChatGPT moment” that made it mainstream.
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Founder Mode to the Rescue!
On Brian Chesky’s Y Combinator talk about “founder mode” versus manager mode (hands-on versus delegation), and how founders return to it in crises.
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The Magic of Tesla FSD
A high-level explanation of how Tesla’s FSD works and why it feels like magic in a box, starting from the end-to-end AI approach of version 12.
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The Apple iBot (?)
On Apple’s reported home robotics project, code-named J595, an iPad-like display on a robotic arm, and what it might be for as a home assistant.
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Vehicle Data
How modern vehicles generate huge amounts of data and the techniques used to store and access it, drawing on Phil’s time founding the cloud team at Rivian (nothing proprietary).
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The AI iPhone
The AI wave is here and Apple is the one Magnificent 7 company without a major AI-powered product yet. Phil sees an enormous opportunity for an AI iPhone.
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Tesla's Future: Autonomy
A month after his humanoid robot article, a look at Tesla’s shift to accelerate AI and autonomy on two fronts: Robotaxi/FSD and Optimus.
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The Read/Write Brain
On Neuralink’s first public demonstration of its brain-machine interface, with a quadriplegic user controlling a computer by thought alone, and how the technology works.
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Real-world AI
Generative AI took the world by storm and Nvidia became the leading tool maker. This early article turns to what real-world AI means.
Read on X →Summaries are brief overviews of each X Article.