According to a Bloomberg report, people familiar with the situation said that Ganesh Venkataramanan, the head of Tesla’s supercomputer “Dojo” project, resigned last month, which has a negative impact on Tesla’s autonomous driving. Technically speaking, this is not a good thing.
Ganesh Venkataramanan previously led Tesla’s Dojo supercomputing project for five years. After his departure, the head of the Dojo project was replaced by Peter Bannon, a former Apple executive who had seven years of experience in executive positions at Tesla.
Dojo is Tesla’s own custom supercomputer platform used for artificial intelligence machine learning, vision technology that helps train its autonomous driving, and more. According to reports, Dojo uses a custom D1 chip designed by Ganesh, Peter and other silicon industry “big guys”.
Tesla has also been installing hardware for Dojo “in recent weeks” at a centralized location in Palo Alto, California, two people familiar with the matter said, adding that it has always relied on multiple data centers in different locations. One of them said that as of Wednesday local time, Ganesh had “disappeared” from Tesla’s employee directory, and at least one other member of the team had also resigned.
It’s not yet known why the executives or employees left, but their departures are a blow to a project that is said to be expensive and technologically advanced.
According to previous reports, at last year’s Tesla 2022 AI Day, officials showed off the latest results of its customized Dojo supercomputer, which consumed so much power that it tripped local substations.
In September of this year, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a pre-market trade that month that Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer may promote the popularity of self-driving taxis and software services, thereby bringing benefits to the electric car maker. The market value has increased by nearly 600 billion US dollars (Note: currently about 4.3 trillion RMB).
Tesla began production of its Dojo supercomputer, used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models for self-driving cars, in July and plans to invest more than $1 billion in Dojo by next year.
