Tesla ditches tech team
Tesla has cancelled its efforts to develop in-house chips for driverless technology and will instead increase its reliance on external technology partners.
The company is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team, which has lost about 20 employees to the newly formed DensityAI and others are being reassigned to other roles at Tesla, reports Automotive News.
Dojo was once considered key to Tesla’s plans around artificial intelligence and was used to train machine-learning models behind the EV maker’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving programmes.
Tesla is now planning to rely more on external partners for high-tech tasks and chip manufacturing.
Chief executive Elon Musk has posted on X that it doesn’t make sense to divide resources between two different AI chip designs.
The Dojo system is based on a custom in-house chip known as the D1, used in training AI, while Tesla’s AI5 and AI6 inference chips run models in cars and robots, reports Automotive News.
Tesla recently agreed a US$16.5 billion (about NZ$28b) deal with Samsung to secure AI semiconductors through 2033, which diversifies its sourcing beyond chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
