Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer challenge is reportedly over. Bloomberg stories that CEO Elon Musk is killing the challenge after a mass exodus of expertise from the Dojo workforce to a competing startup.
Dojo was the identify of Tesla’s in-house AI chip growth to create supercomputers to coach its AI fashions for self-driving.
Tesla employed a bunch of prime chip architects and tried to develop higher AI accelerator chips to rely much less on firms like NVIDIA, AMD, and others.
It has been operating into delays for years.
We beforehand reported on vital setbacks. In 2018, Jim Keller, the famed chip architect who was first employed to guide Tesla’s chip-making effort, left the corporate.
Ganesh Venkataramanan succeeded him, however he left Tesla in 2023.
For the previous few years, Peter Bannon, who labored with Keller for years, has been main Tesla’s chip-making applications, however he’s now reportedly additionally leaving the automaker.
Bloomberg stories that Musk has “ordered the hassle to be shut down.”:
Peter Bannon, who was heading up Dojo, is leaving and Chief Government Officer Elon Musk has ordered the hassle to be shut down, in accordance with the folks, who requested to not be recognized discussing inner issues. The workforce has misplaced about 20 employees just lately to newly shaped DensityAI, and remaining Dojo employees are being reassigned to different information heart and compute tasks inside Tesla, the folks mentioned.
DensityAI is a brand new startup at present in stealth mode, based by a number of former Tesla workers, together with Venkataramanan.
It reportedly plans to construct chips for AI information facilities and robots, very similar to the Dojo program.
The corporate just lately employed 20 former Tesla workers who labored on Dojo.
Whereas this system seemed to be lagging behind for years as Tesla more and more purchased extra compute energy from NVIDIA, Musk has been claiming progress.
The CEO mentioned in June:
Tesla Dojo AI coaching pc making progress. We begin bringing Dojo 2 on-line later this yr. It takes three main iterations for a brand new know-how to be nice. Dojo 2 is nice, however Dojo 3 shall be nice.
Throughout Tesla’s quarterly convention name in late July, the CEO claimed that Dojo 2 shall be “working at scale someday subsequent yr.”
Electrek’s Take
It’s unclear whether or not the report is correct or if it’s an extrapolation from the expertise exodus to Elon killing Dojo, or if Elon was mendacity only a few weeks in the past.
Alternatively, this growth could also be so latest that Elon went from being assured in Dojo a couple of weeks in the past to disbanding the workforce engaged on it now.
Both manner, I feel it’s clear that the challenge has been lagging, and Tesla has been extraordinarily depending on chip suppliers moderately than making its personal.
I feel Dojo being doubtless lifeless shouldn’t be a giant loss for Tesla.
In the case of chip making, creating its personal inference compute for onboard “AI computer systems” was at all times the extra vital challenge.
TSMC is ready to supply Tesla’s new AI5 chip, which is coming quickly, and we now have just lately realized that Samsung shall be manufacturing its AI6 chip.
I feel the larger concern from this report is that it’s the newest instance of an ongoing exodus of expertise at Tesla.
