Tesla has disbanded the team working on its Dojo supercomputer, signaling a shift away from developing in-house chips for autonomous driving technology, as reported by Bloomberg.
Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is departing from Tesla, and the remaining team members are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within the company, according to sources cited by Bloomberg.
Following the exit of approximately 20 employees, who left Tesla to establish their own AI venture named DensityAI, Tesla’s decision to disband Dojo is significant. DensityAI, founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering, is gearing up to unveil its offerings, including chips, hardware, and software tailored for AI applications in robotics, automotive sectors, and among AI agents.
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During Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call, Musk hinted at potential redundancies.
“Thinking about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it seems like intuitively, we want to try to find convergence there, where it’s basically the same chip,” Musk said.
The news comes as Tesla’s board offers Musk a $29 billion pay package to keep him at Tesla and help push the company’s AI efforts forward, rather than getting too sidetracked by his other companies, including the more pure-play AI startup xAI.
TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla for more information.
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