RoMeLa Director Hints at Possible Involvement in Tesla Developments to Be Unveiled at AI Day

Photo: Dennis Hong/Twitter

Tesla is actively recruiting talent to work on its AI team, which develops not only the most advanced software, but also the most powerful hardware that will be the key to achieving its goals. Tesla AI Day will take place in two weeks, where, among other things, the company will describe its progress in creating a training supercomputer called Dojo. The director of RoMeLa also hinted at the possible involvement of his company in development with Tesla, which would be presented during AI ​​Day.

Tesla cars process data on a massive scale utilizing their own company-built chips. Its vehicles need a powerful computer on board, and so they had to develop their own chip capable of processing hundreds of neural tasks and thousands of images per second. Basically, the chips need to be able to work in real-time, processing extremely complex information. After collecting the data, Tesla processes them and releases the next OTA update that improves the fleet.

Given the need for major processing power, Tesla is developing a new supercomputer, Dojo. Its goal is to increase the speed and accuracy of training at least 10 times over the current computer. Dojo is a Neural Network (NN) chip being developed by Tesla's hardware team to increase the learning speed of neural networks at the server-side.

In August 2020, Musk hinted at the computing power of the Dojo computer, writing, "A truly useful exaflop at de facto FP32." An exaFLOP is one quintillion floating-point operations per second or 1,000 petaFLOPS. At the moment, the most powerful computer from the Japanese company Fuji is Fugaku, which has a speed of about 415 petaFLOPS. This means that Dojo will be more than twice the speed of the most powerful supercomputer.

And now, director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), Dennis Hong, hinted at his involvement in Tesla's development, although he did not claim anything. Hong tweeted a picture of what some speculate might be a proprietary chip for Dojo. He also advertised for the upcoming AI Tesla Day, which will take place on August 19 at Palo Alto. Even in itself, this tweet already hints at his likely involvement with Tesla, but it becomes even more interesting yet.

Several Twitter users asked if his work was involved in Tesla's development. Hong responded that he couldn't say anything at the moment, adding some playful emoji to the text as if teasing. After several media outlets picked up the story, Hong revealed even more details. He explained that it is fun for him to watch speculation, and he does not intend to ruin this, adding that he has an NDA. He also added that he is currently heading to Boca Chica, where now, as we know, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is at the SpaceX facility.

It is always fun to speculate and always exciting to see what Elon announces. I have no intentions of stealing the thunder nor ruining the fun - besides I have an NDA…
Just wait and enjoy the AI day!
August 19 5PM PDT
(And I am on my way to Boca Chica now)

— Dennis Hong (@DennisHongRobot) August 3, 2021

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter

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