Ganesh Venkataramanan, the lead of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project, has left the company, sources familiar with the matter revealed to Bloomberg.
Venkataramanan, who spearheaded the Dojo project for five years, departed last month. The sources requested anonymity due to the confidentiality of the information. Prior to this, he was the director for Autopilot hardware for nearly three years at Tesla. Before Tesla, Venkataramanan worked just under 15 years at AMD.
Tesla is developing a NN training computer called Dojo to process truly vast amounts of video data. It’s a beast! Please consider joining our AI or computer/chip teams if this sounds interesting.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 14, 2020
Musk said earlier this year, “Dojo is arguably the biggest computer architecture overhaul since Cray.” He added, “Doesn’t mean it succeeds, but it doesn’t lack for boldness.”
Peter Bannon, a former executive at Apple and a director at Tesla for seven years, has taken over the leadership of the project. Bannon was hired by Tesla in 2016, joining his former Apple colleague Jim Keller at Elon Musk’s company.