Ganesh Venkataramanan, who led Tesla's Dojo supercomputer project for the last five years, has left the company, according to sources familiar with the matter. His departure is considered a setback to Tesla's self-driving technology efforts.
Peter Bannon, a former Apple Inc. executive and a director at Tesla for the last seven years, is now leading the Dojo project. The Dojo supercomputer, designed by Tesla, is meant to train the machine learning models behind the company's self-driving systems. It rapidly processes data captured by vehicles to enhance Tesla's algorithms. Analysts believe that Dojo could provide a significant competitive advantage, with some estimating it could add $500 billion to Tesla's value. Elon Musk has stated that Tesla plans to invest over $1 billion in Project Dojo by the end of 2024. The Dojo system is powered by a custom D1 chip designed by Venkataramanan, Bannon, and others from the silicon industry. It was noted that in recent weeks, Tesla installed hardware for Dojo at a centralized location in Palo Alto, California, consolidating the system from multiple data centers in different locations. Venkataramanan's departure, along with that of at least one other team member, couldn't immediately be learned, but it is seen as a blow to the expensive and technologically advanced project. This comes after the departure of another key artificial intelligence player from Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, who led AI efforts at the company and has since joined OpenAI.
