is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ordered its Dojo supercomputer project to be disbanded after the project’s leader and most of its employees left to join another AI project. The news marked a major setback to the automaker’s efforts to develop its own in-house developed supercomputer to train AI models for self-driving cars. And it signaled yet another blow to Tesla’s ongoing efforts to retain its top talent.
For years, Tesla touted its custom built supercomputer meant to train machine-learning models for Tesla’s Autopilot, Full Self-Driving, and Optimus robots as the thing that will give it the leg up over other autonomous vehicle developers. While the rest of the industry was relying on external suppliers for compute and chips, Tesla would design its hardware in-house. According to Musk’s vision, a vertically integrated AI effort would allow Tesla to leapfrog over its more supply-constrained competitors.
Technical delays and a talent exodus seemed to push success further and further away
But technical delays and a talent exodus seemed to push success further and further away. In 2018, Jim Keller, the famed AI chip developer who was first hired to lead Tesla’s chip making efforts, left. His successor, Ganesh Venkataramanan, left in 2023 to found Density AI. The latest to leave is Peter Bannon, who had been leading Dojo since Venkataramanan’s departure. He is also joining Density AI, along with 20 other ex-Tesla engineers.
Other Tesla executives to head for the exits in recent months include Milan Kovac, head of engineering for Optimus, David Lau, VP of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, one of Musk’s closest lieutenants.
After Bloomberg reported the developments, Musk confirmed Tesla’s change in approach, writing on X that the next-generation AI chips going into the company’s vehicles “will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that.”
Depending where you stand on Tesla, the move is either a glaring sign that the company’s AI efforts are overhyped and underwhelming or it’s a savvy move to save money in an extremely capital-intensive race to build robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Either way, there’s no question the decision represents a major pivot from what Musk has been selling as Tesla’s winning formula for years.
... continue reading