"AI laggards" are getting anxious: After Google "hastily" released Gemini, Musk can't sit still either.

There are rumors that if Venkataramanan's dismissal is true, the Dojo project at Tesla may have serious problems, leading to a reshuffling of senior management.

Are the "AI laggards" getting anxious?

On Wednesday, December 6th, Google launched its revenge weapon Gemini, hyping it up in various promotional materials. However, according to the feedback from the first wave of users, Gemini is not as good as GPT. You can refer to the previous article by Wall Street News titled "Gemini's first wave of user feedback is out: not so good!"

Nowadays, there are rumors that Elon Musk is also getting restless.

Fred Lambert, the editor-in-chief of Electrek (an online news website that reports on electric vehicles), said that Ganesh Venkataramanan, the senior executive of Tesla's Dojo hardware division, has recently left the company.

The Dojo project is a crucial part of Tesla's development of its autonomous driving technology. Dojo is a high-performance computing platform developed by Tesla, mainly used for training machine learning models, especially large models related to autonomous driving. The first Dojo cluster was launched this summer, but it has experienced significant delays in the past.

Venkataramanan has a high reputation in the field of chip design. After working at AMD for 14 years, he joined Tesla. Venkataramanan was hired by Tesla to participate in the company's autonomous driving project in chip manufacturing. His position as Senior Director of Autonomous Driving Hardware plays a very important role at Tesla.

The exact reason for his departure is still unclear. Last month, Electrek reported that there were sources saying that he may have been dismissed due to the underperformance of the next-generation Dojo supercomputer, the "Dojo 2" chip. However, this information has not been officially confirmed. Bloomberg also confirmed his departure yesterday, although it did not specify the specific reason for his departure. But Fred Lambert believes that this makes the reports of his dismissal more credible. If the news is true, there may be some serious issues in the Dojo project, which is why Tesla would want to make significant adjustments at the senior management level and let go of talents like Venkataramanan. Fred Lambert mentioned that he heard he was not the only executive who was dismissed.

Fred Lambert mentioned: "We were very surprised when we first heard the news of his departure, especially when we heard that he might have been fired. Since we only have one source of information, we did not report this news."

In 2023, Nvidia's announcement of the Grace Hopper AI superchip not only tripled its valuation, but also reached a market value of trillions of dollars, shaking the entire AI industry. Fred Lambert believes that with the emergence of Nvidia's Grace Hopper, any new announcements in the AI hardware field by other companies seem pale in comparison. This Dojo plan from Tesla has definitely had a negative impact. Fred Lambert said, "NVIDIA's progress may make Tesla's Dojo 2 chip plan less eye-catching, and this may be one of the reasons why Venkataramanan was fired."

Fred Lambert believes that the worrying thing is that Tesla is still far behind in fulfilling Musk's promise to buyers regarding autonomous driving, and the Dojo supercomputer project has always been seen as the main hope for accelerating progress. However, he is not very hopeful about the release of FSD v12 and remains cautious.