Any fans of Douglas Adams’s masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will recall the iconic scene where the question of “life, the universe, and everything” was posed to supercomputer Deep Thought.
After 7.5 million years of calculating, Deep Thought revealed the answer, 42, and responded to cries of dismay and confusion by pointing out that the question itself wasn’t phrased terribly well.
Will we be similarly mystified by Tesla’s
new supercomputer, Dojo? Read on to learn more about Tesla’s ambitious AI project
. A session at the Dojo
At Tesla’s so-called AI Day, hosted in August of 2021 in sunny Palo Alto, the company revealed some of its new toys, including a suspiciously humanoid robot (it was a person in a costume) and a supercomputing project called Dojo.
The Japanese word dojo translates literally to “place of the way,” and is applied to halls of learning, historically in the field of martial arts. Tesla appears to be borrowing some ancient clout with this name choice.
Dojo, which Elon Musk called a “supercomputer optimized for neural net training,” will be deployed to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature. Full Self-Driving is designed to ingest a huge amount of information about how Teslas behave in the road, thanks to the cars’ cameras, and then change its behavior accordingly.
Tesla engineers, apparently frustrated with existing computers’ inability to analyze all that film and spit something out quickly, turned inward. They built their own chip, and then they built their own supercomputer around it.
Dojo is reported to have a capacity of over an exaflop, which means that it can do more than one quintillion floating-point operations per second, says Electrek
. To put that in perspective, says NetworkWorld
, an exaflop computer can do a calculation in one second that would take you 31,688,765,000 years (that’s billions), and only if you did a calculation every second. Dojo, if it makes it out of the garage, would be in the running for the most powerful supercomputer ever. Trouble in paradise?
This all sounds incredibly cool, but we’ve been handed invites from Tesla that turned out to be for February 31 before. From the continual Cybertruck delays to the promises of millions of robotaxis with Full Self-Driving, we’re not holding our breath for a quick rollout.
Plus, it appears that they’ve had some internal issues with confidentiality. Former engineer Alexander Yatskov downloaded information about Project Dojo onto a personal computer, says Inside EVs
, and subsequently quit the company. Tesla is apparently pursuing damages. The good news—if and when Dojo is unleashed upon Tesla’s troves of video data to do its work, Musk has suggested that he is interested in making it into a more of an open source situation, says Electrek. Other companies could use Dojo to improve their own automotive AI, which would in turn improve safety behind all kinds of non-Tesla wheels. That’s a good reason to be patient.
Beyond Dojo
This project has implications beyond just the development and improvement of Full Self-Driving. For one thing, says Fortune
, Dojo will also train the infamous AI Day robot, Optimus. Optimus will incorporate Full Self-Driving technology to do “dangerous, boring, and repetitive work,” and Musk has suggested that we may see these robots as soon as 2023. Dojo has its work cut out for it, but this is also a step toward Musk’s vision for Tesla as a company beyond an electric carmaker.
“I think long term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company,” said Musk at AI Day 2021.
We’ll see what Musk announces at AI Day 2, in September of 2022, but Tesla’s trajectory grows clearer every day. Perhaps one day our descendants will read stories about Dojo, our generation’s Deep Thought.
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