Elon Musk is on a mission to construct new supercomputers. Because the CEO of Tesla and his new synthetic intelligence startup xAI, the tech titan has massive plans for the way synthetic intelligence can assist to supercharge his companies.
In January, he wrote on X that Tesla needs to be considered as an AI/robotics firm somewhat than a automobile firm. Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer named Dojo is vital to this transformation. Tesla has mentioned it plans to spend $500 million to construct the supercomputer in Buffalo, New York. Tesla can also be constructing one other supercomputer cluster, known as Cortex, on the firm’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Dojo will course of and prepare AI fashions utilizing the big quantities of video and information captured by Tesla vehicles. The aim is to enhance Tesla’s suite of driver help options, which the corporate calls Autopilot, and its extra strong Full Self-Driving or FSD system. Subscriptions to Tesla’s FSD options value $99 a month and embody automated lane adjustments, automated parking and automated stopping for site visitors lights and cease indicators.
“They’ve bought what’s it, 5 million plus vehicles. Every a kind of vehicles usually has eight cameras plus in it. And if you happen to assume then that these vehicles are driving round, let’s simply say 10,000 miles a yr on common, they’re streaming all of that video again to Tesla,” says Steven Dickens, chief expertise advisor on the Futurum Group. “So what can they do with that coaching set? Clearly they’ll develop Full Self-Driving and so they’re getting near that.”
Regardless of their names, neither Autopilot nor FSD make Tesla autos autonomous and require energetic driver supervision, as Tesla states on its web site. Previously, the corporate has garnered scrutiny from regulators who say that Tesla falsely marketed the capabilities of its Autopilot and FSD programs. However reaching full autonomy is important for Tesla, whose sky-high valuation is essentially depending on bringing robotaxis to market, some analysts say.
The corporate reported lackluster ends in its newest earnings report and has fallen behind different automakers engaged on autonomous automobile expertise. These embody Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already commercially working totally autonomous taxis in a number of U.S. cities, GM’s Cruise and Amazon’s Zoox. In China, rivals embody Didi and Baidu.
Tesla hopes Dojo, which Musk says has been operating duties for Tesla since 2023, will change that. A Tesla robotaxi occasion initially scheduled for August is now anticipated to happen in early October.
Dojo will also be helpful for coaching Tesla’s humanoid robotic, Optimus, which the corporate plans to make use of in its factories beginning subsequent yr. Musk has mentioned that Tesla plans to spend $10 billion this yr on AI.
Musk can also be betting on supercomputers to run his new AI enterprise xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to develop giant language fashions and AI merchandise, like its chatbot Grok, as a substitute for AI instruments created by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
Regardless of being one among its founders, Elon Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since turn into one of many firm’s harshest critics. In June, it was introduced that xAI would construct a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee to coach Grok. In early September, Musk revealed {that a} portion of the Memphis supercomputer, known as Colossus, was already on-line.
To be taught extra about Elon Musk’s supercomputer plans, watch the video.