An executive from Zoox has shared some choice words for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, just as the Amazon-owned company starts rolling out its first driverless ride-hailing vehicles in two U.S. cities.
During an interview at the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference on Wednesday, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson cast doubt on Tesla’s recent claims that Unsupervised FSD could be seen in some of the company’s vehicles as soon as next year. Levenson claimed that Tesla doesn’t currently “have technology that works” when asked if regulatory or technology issues were the larger problem in the company’s path to robotaxi deployment.
“The more fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works,” Levinson said of Tesla’s FSD. “And by works, I want to differentiate between a driver assistance system that drives most of the time — except when it doesn’t, and then you have to take over — versus a system that’s so reliable and robust that you don’t need a person in it.”
The executive also highlighted that he doesn’t think Tesla’s camera-based FSD doesn’t have enough equipment to properly keep people safe, saying that it can “lull you into this false sense of complacency” before actually going on to do the wrong thing.
“Our perspective is you really do need significantly more hardware than Tesla is putting in their vehicles to build a robotaxi that is not just as safe, but as especially safer than a human,” Levinson adds.
Elon Musk followed up with a response to the story, highlighting the fact that Zoox wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for Amazon bailing them out.
If he hadn’t gotten bailed out by Amazon, his company would be dead already
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2024
You can watch the full interview with Levinson below, with the question about Tesla’s FSD taking place a little after 21 minutes.
Tesla’s FSD Supervised, Cybercab, and competition
Earlier this month, Tesla held its “We, Robot” event to unveil the two-seater fully autonomous Cybercab platform, which it expects to begin mass producing before 2027. Teslarati was among those at the event, and among the first to take a ride in the Cybercab, coverage of which you can see on X here.
While Tesla owners can already use FSD Supervised by either paying a monthly subscription or purchasing the software along with their vehicle, the company has yet to roll out a ride-hailing service for vehicle owners, or a completely unsupervised offering of the software. Tesla said during the event that Model 3 and Model Y owners will get access to Unsupervised FSD in California and Texas by next year, before rolling the software out to the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X shortly thereafter.
Alphabet-owned Waymo has already started deploying driverless ride-hailing vehicles in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Zoox also announced this month its plans to deploy completely driverless robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, General Motors-owned (GM-owned) self-driving company Cruise is attempting to re-launch paid rides, after facing legal troubles and staff shake-ups following an accident with a pedestrian last October.
Still, Tesla has constantly said that its technology will be more scalable than those of other companies, due to the software being trained by the many drivers who use it in their own cars. The company has also touted its software’s neural network being trained on vast amounts of real-world driving footage, rather than with specific commands in a geofenced area of operation, which it claims makes it able to better handle fringe scenarios.
Tesla investment in autonomous driving program to exceed $10 billion this year: Musk
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
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.
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
