Tesla’s Pete Bannon, vice president of hardware design engineering, left the company after first joining in 2016 appleCNBC has confirmed.
Bannon led the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg Bannon’s departure was first reported, adding that Musk ordered his team to close and that the team’s engineers would be reassigned to other programs.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk has been trying to convince shareholders since the beginning of last year that his only public trading business, Tesla, is expected to become a powerful country in artificial intelligence and robotics, not just electric car companies.
At the heart of the transformation is Dojo, a custom supercomputer designed to process and train AI models to map large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla cars.
Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex aims to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance system and enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robots.
Musk said on Tesla’s July revenue call that the company expects its latest version of Dojo to be “run on a massive scale sometime next year with a scale of about 100,000 h-100 equivalents” referring to the supercomputer built. Nvidia’s The most advanced chip.
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Tesla is operating a test robot service in Austin, Texas, and has opened related automotive services in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require human safety supervisors in the front passenger seat, if necessary. In San Francisco, car services are operated by human drivers, although invited users can ride through the Tesla robotaxi app.
On the revenue call, Musk faced questions about how he thinks of Tesla and his AI company Xai because they can compete with each other for AI talents and keep a distance.
Musk said the companies are “doing different things.” “Xai is doing it like the Terabyte scale model and the multi-stability scale model,” he said. He said Tesla uses “100 times smaller models” and automakers focus on “real world AI” and its cars and robots and XAI focus on developing software that works for “artificial super intelligence.”
Musk also said some engineers would not join Tesla because “they want to work in Agi”, which is why he said he started a new company.
Due to the combination of job termination and resignation, Tesla has experienced this year’s top talent from Egypt this year. Tesla’s head of Optimus Robotics Engineering, Milan Kovac, as well as David Lau, vice president of software engineering, and Musk’s former chief of staff, Omead Afshar, also left.
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