Tesla’s head of Dojo hardware has left the company, and he was possibly let go over issues with the next generation of the supercomputer, according to a source.
Ganesh Venkataramanan was hired at Tesla by Jim Keller and company when Elon Musk wanted to build a chip-making team to support its self-driving effort.
He participated in the development of Tesla’s self-driving chips, but more recently, he was in charge of the Dojo supercomputer hardware.
Venkataramanan’s official role at Tesla was Senior Director Autopilot Hardware.
Last month, a source told Electrek that Venkataramanan was let go at Tesla. We weren’t able to confirm the news, but Bloomberg confirmed he left the company today without specifying a reason for the departure.
The source told us that rumors at Tesla around the departure is that the second-generation “Dojo 2” chip is not meeting expectations.
Tesla is using its Dojo supercomputer to accelerate its neural net learning program for its self-driving effort.
The first Dojo cluster came online this summer after a significant delay.
Electrek’s Take
Venkataramanan is a very respected chip designer in the industry and came to Tesla after 14 years at AMD.
When we first learned that he left Tesla, and especially that he was reportedly let go, we were surprised, and since we only had one source, we didn’t report on it.
Top comment by Michael
Banking on Dojo to be the fundamental accelerator of FSD is naive. Computing power matters for training. But the road to autonomous vehicles depends more on fundamental improvements to AI and neural net architectures more than just massive training power.
But now Bloomberg is confirming his departure – giving some credibility to the report we had about him being let go.
If that’s indeed true, there must be some significant problems with the Dojo program for Tesla to want a significant shake-up at the top and let go of a talent like Venkataramanan. And we are hearing that he is not the only head to roll.
This is a bit worrying because Tesla is still way behind Elon Musk’s self-driving promises to buyers, and one of the main hopes for progress to accelerate has been the Dojo supercomputer program.
I am here, waiting for FSD v12, and not getting my hopes up.
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