Elon Musk posted on X that Tesla will be restarting work on Dojo3, the third generation of its in-house supercomputer project. The Dojo team had been disbanded last year as the company prioritized the AI chips that run on board Tesla vehicles. Musk said the company is returning to the project “now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape.”
The purpose of the Dojo project is to process video recordings and other data from Tesla vehicles and use that to train the “neural net” behind the company’s Full Self-Driving software. Last year, however, Musk posted on X that “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs. The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that.”
The AI chips Musk is referring to are ones developed for running FSD onboard Tesla vehicles and are not optimized for training. The AI6 chips will be made by Samsung in the company’s Texas factory, after it struck a $16 billion agreement with Tesla.
Musk has also claimed a lot of things over the years, and many of those assertions either were misrepresentations or simply didn’t pan out. Working against this chip project: Musk said that Dojo3 will be “space-based AI compute,” as he and others believe that data centers in orbit are a superior alternative to the land-based behemoths currently being built. The idea is that space provides easier access to the sun’s energy, and the cold temperatures there might greatly reduce the power needed, among other benefits. While it’s an increasingly popular if entirely speculative idea, experts have their doubts.
