A longtime Dojo ally, Elon Musk has officially put a stake in his ambitious Dojo project. This big new AI training supercomputer that CEO Elon Musk had touted as key for the company’s self-driving initiatives. At the same time, around August 2024, this decision lined up with Musk’s laying out a new direction toward a major pivot to a project called Cortex.
Dojo is Tesla’s “giant new AI training supercluster.” Designed at the company’s global headquarters in Austin Texas, it is intended to take on advanced, real-world AI challenges. In 2023, financial analysts from Morgan Stanley had predicted that Dojo could add $500 billion to Tesla’s market value by paving the way for new revenue streams through robotaxis and software services.
At first, Musk was very bullish on Dojo’s prospects. And he underscored his AI team’s focus on centering the community in the project. They’ll “double down” as Tesla doubles down getting ready for the robotaxi reveal in October 2024. But in September, a series of sudden changes took the company in a new direction.
During Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call, Musk devoted some time to touting Dojo. When pressed, he acknowledged that it still is a crucial part of Tesla’s AI dreams. The announced departure of Peter Bannon, Dojo’s lead, marks a turning point. Bannon’s departure just even better positions the rest of our team in dealing and continuing an agenda. They are being promptly moved onto other Tesla data center and compute projects.
Tesla is betting big on Dojo. The company said it would strengthen its overall dependence on external technology partners such as Nvidia and AMD for computational needs, and Samsung for chip manufacturing. While this shift is gradual, it represents a fundamental change in the once consensus-first, centralized nature of the Dojo project.
Musk has been loud on the need to process huge quantities of video data to accomplish full self-driving. He stated, “Dojo would be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions” due to its capacity to handle massive amounts of data efficiently. Now, as the future of the project hangs in the balance, the automaker is looking to other possibilities.
Tesla is working on a next-gen D2 chip designed to overcome information flow bottlenecks found in its predecessors. This chip will likely be instrumental to the company’s continuous goal of accelerating in AI advancements.
The robotaxi project — presumed to be the biggest beneficiary of Dojo, by far — has already had a pretty disastrous start. In June, a major progressive robotaxi rollout began in Austin. The service used Model Y vehicles, each with a human operator in the front passenger seat. Advocates suggest that these vehicles were particularly bad actors in driving behavior throughout this pilot program.
Former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan has recently started DensityAI. He was joined by ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering, a testament to the rapidly thawing relations within Tesla’s AI arms race.
Musk has consistently advocated for shareholders to reframe their perception of Tesla as not just an automotive company but as an AI and robotics enterprise. With Dojo now out of the equation, questions about its place in this larger story persist.
