News
GM Cruise unit issues fleet-wide ‘recall’ following viral collision
General Motors’ (GM) self-driving taxi unit, Cruise, has “recalled” its fleet of vehicles following a viral crash with a bus earlier this week.
Automakers worldwide are investing billions into autonomous driving, and while Tesla and Mercedes are currently the clear leaders, other top brands, including Ford, Hyundai/Kia, and GM, have also entered the mix. For GM, that comes in the form of its level 3 autonomous taxis serving the San Francisco area under the brand name Cruise. However, in this effort, there have been a few hurdles, and earlier this week, Cruise was forced to introduce a fleet-wide OTA update recall to fix an issue that made the company go viral.
As initially reported by Reuters, the Cruise robotaxi that has gained so much notoriety over the past week collided with a San Francisco bus, injuring nobody but causing minor damage to the Cruise vehicle. Now, to ensure this issue doesn’t reappear, Cruise issued an OTA update, stating that the vehicle had incorrectly predicted the movement of the bus in front of it.
The details of this week’s crash were outlined in a blog post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. According to Vogt, the bus had driven in front of the Cruise vehicle roughly one block earlier, and the taxi followed the bus, continuing its pre-existing route. The robotaxi made an error when the bus stopped abruptly, which resulted in the autonomous vehicle colliding into the back of it at roughly ten mph.
The recall issued by the company affects all 300 of its vehicles, and according to the CEO, it will ensure that this rare situation doesn’t happen again.
“Fender benders like this rarely happen to our AVs,” began Vogt, “but this incident was unique. We do not expect our vehicles to run into the back of a city bus under any conditions, so even a single incident like this was worthy of immediate and careful study.”
Luckily, as noted by the CEO, this occurrence is quite rare, with the last time it happened being in early 2022. Nonetheless, Vogt states that this is only more reason to double down on safety and improve the product.
“The process we followed, in this case, is just one example of our commitment to safety and our ability to rapidly diagnose, react to, and remedy any issues we may encounter,” continued the Cruise CEO. “We will undoubtedly continue to discover ways in which we can improve, even if that involves changing software that is currently deployed in the field. We think any potential improvement to roadway safety is worthwhile, and we will approach it with the same level of rigor as we’ve demonstrated here. These continuous improvements are likely to make voluntary recalls commonplace.”
As for GM, the progress made by Cruise may become significantly more valuable as it plans to introduce more vehicles shortly capable of using its level 2 “SuperCruise” autonomous driving system. And while these products will be far from the capabilities of the Cruise taxis in California, they can serve as a taste of what is to come as America’s largest automaker continues to work on AV improvement.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo 3,” Elon Musk wrote in a post on X.
Tesla has restarted work on its Dojo 3 initiative, its in-house AI training supercomputer, now that its AI5 chip design has reached a stable stage.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the update in a recent post on X.
Tesla’s Dojo 3 initiative restarted
In a post on X, Musk said that with the AI5 chip design now “in good shape,” Tesla will resume work on Dojo 3. He added that Tesla is hiring engineers interested in working on what he expects will become the highest-volume AI chips in the world.
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3. If you’re interested in working on what will be the highest volume chips in the world, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved,” Musk wrote in his post on X.
Musk’s comment followed a series of recent posts outlining Tesla’s broader AI chip roadmap. In another update, he stated that Tesla’s AI4 chip alone would achieve self-driving safety levels well above human drivers, AI5 would make vehicles “almost perfect” while significantly enhancing Optimus, and AI6 would be focused on Optimus and data center applications.
Musk then highlighted that AI7/Dojo 3 will be designed to support space-based AI compute.
Tesla’s AI roadmap
Musk’s latest comments helped resolve some confusion that emerged last year about Project Dojo’s future. At the time, Musk stated on X that Tesla was stepping back from Dojo because it did not make sense to split resources across multiple AI chip architectures.
He suggested that clustering large numbers of Tesla AI5 and AI6 chips for training could effectively serve the same purpose as a dedicated Dojo successor. “In a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether for inference or training, simply to reduce network cabling complexity & cost by a few orders of magnitude,” Musk wrote at the time.
Musk later reinforced that idea by responding positively to an X post stating that Tesla’s AI6 chip would effectively be the new Dojo. Considering his recent updates on X, however, it appears that Tesla will be using AI7, not AI6, as its dedicated Dojo successor. The CEO did state that Tesla’s AI7, AI8, and AI9 chips will be developed in short, nine-month cycles, so Dojo’s deployment might actually be sooner than expected.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
xAI has brought its Colossus 2 supercomputer online, making it the first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster in the world, and it’s about to get even bigger in a few months.
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
Colossus 2 goes live
The Colossus 2 supercomputer, together with its predecessor, Colossus 1, are used by xAI to primarily train and refine the company’s Grok large language model. In a post on X, Musk stated that Colossus 2 is already operational, making it the first gigawatt training cluster in the world.
But what’s even more remarkable is that it would be upgraded to 1.5 GW of power in April. Even in its current iteration, however, the Colossus 2 supercomputer already exceeds the peak demand of San Francisco.
Commentary from users of the social media platform highlighted the speed of execution behind the project. Colossus 1 went from site preparation to full operation in 122 days, while Colossus 2 went live by crossing the 1-GW barrier and is targeting a total capacity of roughly 2 GW. This far exceeds the speed of xAI’s primary rivals.
Funding fuels rapid expansion
xAI’s Colossus 2 launch follows xAI’s recently closed, upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, which exceeded its initial $15 billion target. The company said the capital will be used to accelerate infrastructure scaling and AI product development.
The round attracted a broad group of investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group. Strategic partners NVIDIA and Cisco also continued their support, helping xAI build what it describes as the world’s largest GPU clusters.
xAI said the funding will accelerate its infrastructure buildout, enable rapid deployment of AI products to billions of users, and support research tied to its mission of understanding the universe. The company noted that its Colossus 1 and 2 systems now represent more than one million H100 GPU equivalents, alongside recent releases including the Grok 4 series, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Training is also already underway for its next flagship model, Grok 5.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI5 chip nears completion, Elon Musk teases 9-month development cadence
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Tesla’s next-generation AI5 chip is nearly complete, and work on its successor is already underway, as per a recent update from Elon Musk.
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Musk details AI chip roadmap
In his post, Elon Musk stated that Tesla’s AI5 chip design is “almost done,” while AI6 has already entered early development. Musk added that Tesla plans to continue iterating rapidly, with AI7, AI8, AI9, and future generations targeting a nine-month design cycle.
He also noted that Tesla’s in-house chips could become the highest-volume AI processors in the world. Musk framed his update as a recruiting message, encouraging engineers to join Tesla’s AI and chip development teams.
Tesla community member Herbert Ong highlighted the strategic importance of the timeline, noting that faster chip cycles enable quicker learning, faster iteration, and a compounding advantage in AI and autonomy that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to close.
AI5 manufacturing takes shape
Musk’s comments align with earlier reporting on AI5’s production plans. In December, it was reported that Samsung is preparing to manufacture Tesla’s AI5 chip, accelerating hiring for experienced engineers to support U.S. production and address complex foundry challenges.
Samsung is one of two suppliers selected for AI5, alongside TSMC. The companies are expected to produce different versions of the AI5 chip, with TSMC reportedly using a 3nm process and Samsung using a 2nm process.
Musk has previously stated that while different foundries translate chip designs into physical silicon in different ways, the goal is for both versions of the Tesla AI5 chip to operate identically. AI5 will succeed Tesla’s current AI4 hardware, formerly known as Hardware 4, and is expected to support the company’s Full Self-Driving system as well as other AI-driven efforts, including Optimus.