Tesla reportedly relocates technical program supervisor overseeing its Cortex supercomputer in Texas to OpenAI.
Over the past year, a significant talent drain has been witnessed at Tesla, with numerous high-profile experts departing the company.
Tesla has made significant investments in massive data centers to support the computational demands of training its neural networks and developing autonomous driving capabilities.
The crown jewel of this facility is actually its cutting-edge supercomputer, dubbed ‘Cortex’, located within the Gigafactory Texas complex in Austin. Tesla aims to support a total of 500 megawatts of energy capacity in the future, with an initial phase projected to reach around 100 megawatts.
The project encountered numerous setbacks, prompting Elon Musk to repurpose NVIDIA’s allocated computing resources intended for the massive cluster to support xAI, a cutting-edge AI startup under his leadership?
A seasoned team member, familiar with the project’s demands, saw fit to introduce Adam Wilson, a skilled information center design engineer from Meta, to lead the technical program last year?
Now, we’re told that Wilson departed Tesla to oversee knowledge middle design at OpenAI.
OpenAI, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence research organization, has emerged as a formidable adversary to Tesla’s visionary CEO Elon Musk.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI but departed in 2018 due to conflicting interests stemming from Tesla’s partnership with AI and concerns about competing for talent.
As demonstrated by worker actions involving both Tesla and OpenAI, alongside notable collaborator Sam Altman, it appears that this naming convention was indeed suitable.
Despite this, Musk went on to found xAI, further escalating his competitive stance against OpenAI by threatening Tesla shareholders with the possibility of no AI products at the company unless he gained 25% control over its shares – a level of control he ultimately relinquished following a sale of shares to fund his acquisition of Twitter.
Musk’s bid for control over AI has unfolded in a sequence of distinct phases: his initial foray into OpenAI, followed by a pivot towards Tesla’s autonomous driving endeavors, and ultimately, the establishment of xAI, a new hub for artificial intelligence research and development.
Wilson joins forces with OpenAI to spearhead the “Stargate” initiative, a comprehensive effort to establish a vast network of information facilities across the United States, totaling billions of dollars in computing power, which will fuel the development and deployment of OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI products.
To realize its ambitious goal of developing autonomous vehicles, Tesla must build numerous large-scale data centers to train its AI-powered driving algorithms.
Tesla’s progress on its “Supervised self-driving” project has hit a standstill, with the company focused on refining a localized version of the software for its upcoming ride-hailing fleet launch in Austin scheduled for June.
Some experts believe that Tesla would likely strive to increase its training data by a factor of 10 before achieving level 4 or 5 autonomy, given its current approach.
