It seems like to me they took a big bet and it didn’t pay off. They may not have felt like they could rely on Nvidia to deliver the promised Tensor Core performance.
It's a bit premature to call this a failure given they are barely at a stage of making first chips and validating them.
You don't seem to understand the timelines of designing chips like that from scratch.
Dojo has been in works for almost 7 years. Tesla will continue to work on this for the next 20 years. There will be Dojo v2, Dojo v3 etc. just like at SpaceX there was Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy.
This still might end up a failure but they clearly feel confident enough to talk about Dojo publicly, which wasn't the case for the first 5 years of its development.
Thanks for explaining to me what I don’t know. Clearly you’re a Tesla fanboy.
There is no doubt that it is an amazing piece of tech but I’m not confident Tesla will be able to pull off beating NVidia. Especially when compared to NVidias Tensor Cores and economics of scale. I don’t like their whole approach to self driving ML. I know a lot of people disagree with me so I would rather not get into it.
I think a lot of the talk of future performance is posturing in order to get NVidia chips at cheaper prices.
I'm sure that it's at least partially for them to have a better negotiating position with NVIDIA. But the reality is that Tesla actually has some very good expertise in chip design. Jim Keller worked there for several years and along with Pete Bannon designed their Autopilot HW3 computer which is in 1+ million cars right now. At the time that HW3 was released it outperformed what NVIDIA had to offer. That said it's not likely they'll be able to beat NVIDIA, but they may be able to beat them for their hyper domain specific use cases. Additionally NVIDIA chips are difficult to get and they're extremely expensive. Even if Tesla can get something that performs 80-90% as good as NVIDIA but at significantly lower cost then it may still be worth it.
I know these things. I think some of the dojo architecture was a reaction to their FSD chips being over optimized for resnet style models. They’re targeting extremely large models which is a new frontier for ML and in my view not the panacea they hoped it would be.
I think with better ML they wouldn’t need so many chips, be it NVidia or Dojo.
