Tesla
Tesla Dojo supercomputer head exits, former Apple executive takes charge
Ganesh Venkataramanan, who’s been leading the Dojo project for the past five years, left Tesla last month reported Bloomberg citing people related to this matter.
In the following, Tesla appointed Peter Bannon, as a new leader of the project. Bannon is a former Apple executive and director at Tesla and serving the EV maker for the last seven years.
Dojo is a supercomputer designed and developed by Tesla for input video processing and model training for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driving software.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk first mentioned Dojo in April 2019 during the Investor Day event. Two years later, Dojo officially made its debut at Tesla’s AI Day in 2021.
Initially, the EV maker relied heavily on Nvidia’s AI chip offerings but the company soon came up with a plan for a custom D1 7nm chip.
These chips are designed by Tesla engineers and chip specialists in the field of AI and semiconductors. The fundamental unit of the Dojo D1 chip was designed by the Tesla team led by Ganesh, Emil Taipes, and more.
A report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily revealed that Tesla will double its Dojo D1 ASIC order with TSMC to 10,000 units in 2024. It is expected that the order volume may increase even further in 2025.
Dojo is seen as a key technology by industry analysts, Morgan Stanly estimated that this Tesla-owned supercomputer could generate $500 billion to Tesla’s value.
To continue the development phase, Musk also announced a plan to invest $1 billion in Dojo by the end of next year.
Aside from Ganesh, Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI and Autopilot at Tesla, also left Tesla last year. Karpathy later joined ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
For now, Tesla and CEO Musk have not commented on this matter.
(source – Bloomberg)