According to a recent report published by Bloomberg, Tesla has shut down its Dojo supercomputer project. The project was working towards building autonomous driving technology - an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that offers varying degrees of automation in the vehicle to almost completely reduce the need for driver intervention.
The report further mentioned the exit of Peter Bannon, the head of the Dojo project, from the tech giant. Due to this, the Tesla board offered Elon Musk $29 billion as compensation to invest in Tesla's other AI goals, such as xAI.
Peter Bannon, the leader of the Dojo project, announced his exit from the company. After this decision, Tesla assigned the remaining employees to other data centers.
However, 20 team members of the Dojo project left the firm to join DensityAI, an AI startup founded by Ganesh Venkataramanan, a former Dojo executive. Ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering also joined DensityAI as co-founders.
The AI startup’s primary focus is manufacturing computer chips and hardware. It also aims to develop software to power AI-driven data centers. With the help of former Dojo engineers, DensityAI holds the potential to revolutionize the AI hardware sector.
Tesla has depended on various partners, such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Samsung, for its AI and computer chip requirements. The Dojo supercomputer was meant to be the backbone of Tesla’s AI ambitions. Its main goal was to develop a fully self-driving technology for Tesla vehicles (FSD). However, Elon Musk had to shift the company’s focus towards Cortex because of the resignation of Dojo’s top executives.
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To sum up, Tesla is closing down its ambitious Dojo supercomputer project. With project head Peter Bannon leaving the company, some project employees were assigned to other data centers, and almost 20 project engineers joined DensityAI, an AI startup founded by Ganesh Venkataramanan. Amidst all this, Tesla’s partnership with companies like Samsung is growing. Recently, the automaker signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung.