Transportation Image Credits: Bryce Durbin | TechCrunch For years, Elon Musk has talked about Dojo — the AI supercomputer that will be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions. It’s important enough to Musk that he recently said the company’s AI team is going to “ double down ” on Dojo as Tesla gears up to reveal its robotaxi in October.
But what exactly is Dojo? And why is it so critical to Tesla’s long-term strategy?
In short: Dojo is Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that’s designed to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks. Beefing up Dojo goes hand-in-hand with Tesla’s goal to reach full self-driving and bring a robotaxi to market. FSD, which is on about 2 million Tesla vehicles today, can perform some automated driving tasks, but still requires a human to be attentive behind the wheel.
Tesla delayed the reveal of its robotaxi , which was slated for August, to October, but both Musk’s public rhetoric and information from sources inside Tesla tell us that the goal of autonomy isn’t going away.
And Tesla appears poised to spend big on AI and Dojo to reach that feat. Tesla’s Dojo backstory
Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing “Cyber Rodeo” grand opening party on April 7, 2022 in Austin, Texas. Image Credits: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty images Musk doesn’t want Tesla to be just an automaker, or even a purveyor of solar panels and energy storage systems. Instead, he wants Tesla to be an AI company, one that has cracked the code to self-driving cars by mimicking human perception.
Most other companies building autonomous vehicle technology rely on a combination of sensors to perceive the world – like lidar, radar and cameras – as well as high-definition maps to localize the vehicle. Tesla believes it can achieve fully autonomous driving by relying on cameras alone to capture visual data and then use advanced neural networks to process that data and make quick decisions about how the car should behave.
As Tesla’s former head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, said at the automaker’s first AI Day in 2021 , the company is basically trying to […]
Tesla Dojo: Elon Musk’s big plan to build an AI supercomputer, explained
