Elon Musk hints at Tesla’s not-so-secret Dojo AI-training supercomputer capacity

Elon Musk has made a rare new comment about Tesla’s now not-so-secret ‘Dojo’ program to create an AI-training supercomputer and gave a hint of its capacity.

Last year at Tesla’s Autonomy Day, the CEO first confirmed the existence of the ‘Dojo’ program:

“We do have a major program at Tesla which we don’t have enough time to talk about today called “Dojo”. That’s a super powerful training computer. The goal of Dojo will be to be able to take in vast amounts of data and train at a video level and do unsupervised massive training of vast amounts of video with the Dojo program – or Dojo computer.”

Dojo means  “place of the Way” in Japanese and the term is often used for a place to practice meditation or martial arts.

In this case, the Dojo supercomputer will be a place for Tesla to train its Full Self-Driving AI.

While the project has been ongoing for a while at Tesla, it is still not ready for primetime.

In fact, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter this weekend to try to help recruit people for the program at Tesla:

“Tesla is developing a NN training computer called Dojo to process truly vast amounts of video data. It’s a beast! Please consider joining our AI or computer/chip teams if this sounds interesting.”

Furthermore, the CEO hinted at the computing power of the Dojo computer:

An exaFLOP is one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS.

This would make Tesla’s Dojo a truly cutting-edge supercomputer considering there’s currently a race to break the exaFLOP barrier in supercomputing with companies like Intel and AMD, along with governments, in the running.

Here’s what Intel’s Aurora’s exaFLOP supercomputer looks like:

Though Musk makes it sound like it wouldn’t be a general purpose supercomputer and instead be optimized for training computer vision artificial intelligence on videos.

It’s different from what those other companies are trying to achieve, but it is still an ambitious goal.

There’s current’y no clear timeline for Tesla to have Dojo up and running, but Musk’s new recruiting effort shows that Tesla is actively looking for people for the program.