As sales continue to plummet worldwide, Tesla is giving up on building an in-house supercomputer for computer vision processing as part of its advanced driver assistance system.
As Bloomberg reports, the head of the project, dubbed Dojo and which CEO Elon Musk used to hype up immensely, is leaving the company. The team has already lost around 20 workers to a separate data center firm that's been poaching former Tesla executives.
The rest of the team will reportedly be reassigned to other data center projects.
Considering that Musk has refocused the company's efforts on a robotaxi service that relies on computer vision, it's not exactly confidence-inducing. Musk once called Dojo a "beast," but admitted last year that he had come to think of Dojo "as a long shot" because "it's not something that is a high probability."
"It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs," Musk tweeted on Thursday.
Instead, per Bloomberg, Tesla is looking to rely on external tech partners, including Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung, for manufacturing AI chips. But the company isn't giving up on its in-house chips entirely.
"The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training," Musk wrote. "All effort is focused on that."
Dojo was designed to train machine learning models powering Tesla's Autopilot and so-called "Full Self-Driving" advanced driver assistance software.
But Tesla's Dojo team quickly fell victim to surging competition. The enormous AI hype has led to major tech companies poaching key talent, offering staffers at competing firms absurd sums of money.
Even beyond its AI efforts, Tesla has suffered from a major brain drain, with key execs leaving the company in droves.
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