There was no reason to waste money for this. You don't want to focus on two incredibly resource-intense and error-prone processes in the same company (Automotive, Semiconductor).
This is a hype project simply created to pump up the stock price.
This is a hype project simply created to pump up the stock price.
> two incredibly resource-intense and error-prone processes in the same company (Automotive, Semiconductor).
If you think making these chips is excessive, you don't know Tesla. Tesla is the most vertically integrated car company in the world (maybe BYD compares).
Compared to literally designing not only their own batteries cells, but their own battery chemistries plus their own battery materials process AND their own fully up battery manufacturing factories. They started doing this a decade ago and only this year the first cars rolled of the line and being sold to costumers. That is years and years of investment, planning and internal capacity building.
In 2017 people were laughing at them for attempting to do all their own manufactriong. Now they have industry dominating automotive margin. They literally have their own materials team that makes their own aluminum for casting and have co-developed production machines that are the size of a whole house. This is now slowly being copied by other manufactures.
They also make their own glass, seats and a whole host of other things that most car companies don't make. Doing these things in-house cost billions and billions in capx.
Also, Dojo is not the only chip they make, they have other chips that are already being sold in their cars by the millions every year. Dojo is a pittance of investment compared to that and a fraction of the total investment into the overall self-driving stack. Just because you don't agree with the overall strategy (assuming from your comment) doesn't mean that they many, many billions Tesla spends isn't real, or its all some sort of stock price play.
So, if you think Dojo is about stock price, I don't know what to tell you, its just wrong.
However I do agree that Dojo isn’t about the stock price though I’m sure it’s about reducing their bottom line costs long term.
Weird. I though competition, even when the Leader is far ahead is a good thing and up to the Investors.
No idea whether they can make it work, it is really hard, especially adjusting their tools, but they have written most tools themselves, so adjusting should be possible. Making those tools available to outsiders one day ? can happen, doesn't have to.
A non-issue if you understand the design space of TPU-like AI accelerators. The understanding shouldn't even be necessary because the major players (Google, now Amazon) already build their TPUs and have been for years.
Nvidia tax is too much.
After first AI day Tesla stock dropped significantly. Wall Street doesn't understand Tesla as anything else but a car company and won't understand AI until it start producing billions in revenues.
It's exceedingly poor stock pump.
They've been working on Dojo for almost 7 years. They kept it secret for the first 5.
Kind of contradicts the "stock pump" memes.
They start talking about it now because those efforts are very advanced and they want to hire more people.
With Musk, everything is a step towards the end goal(s), like colonizing Mars (which might even be the only goal since it ties everything together; it’s much easier to send humanoids to prepare for colonization and it’s not like HCI seems at all a priority unlike many other AI efforts).
My guess is that with Tesla, Musk aims to create AGI in a way he can control (as you may recall, he has previously talked about fears of the tech and control is a natural strategy to handle this). The cars are just the step that enables the next, so he basically just invests in the future over short term gains, which is a very reasonable business decision.
Custom silicon is likely unavoidable if you want to lead the AGI field, so he would just be investing in the next step of the plan. Tesla Bot is a good indicator of this direction.
Tesla Bot was the human in a bot costume dancing on stage [0], right? If so, then yes, this is quite a good indicator of the seriousness of this direction.
Did we ever get anything more substantive about Tesla Bot though?