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Tesla details its self-driving Supercomputer that will bring in the Dojo era

(Credit: Tesla)

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Tesla’s Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, detailed the automaker’s self-driving Supercomputer that will era in Dojo. Dojo is Tesla’s 4-dimensional Autopilot training program and was first discussed in 2020 by CEO Elon Musk. Karpathy gave a 40-minute presentation regarding Autonomous Vehicles at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021).

Tesla has been working on its self-driving program for several years, and through that time, it has trained its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving suite by using a Neural Network to make it more accurate and robust in its movement. As a result, Tesla has established itself as one of the companies with the most robust semi-autonomous driving programs globally.

Despite this, Tesla continues to make strides to improve it even further. This started back in August 2020, when CEO Elon Musk detailed Dojo, a 4-dimensional training program that will process monumental volumes of video data. This aligns with Tesla’s recent decision to adopt a Vision-only approach in its vehicles, ditching radar in the Model 3 and Model Y.

Musk said:

“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.”

For a long time, Tesla has worked with what Musk called “just been like 2D.” He said that the 4D system would work tremendously better since it’s basically video.

During the Q2 2020 Earnings Call, Musk said:

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“So what we’ve been doing, thus far, has really just been like 2D — mostly 2D, and like I said, well correlated in time. So just hard to convey just how much better a fully 4D system would work — does work. It’s capable of things that if you just look — looking at things as individual pictures as opposed to video — basically, like you could go from like individual pictures to surround video, so it’s fundamental. So the car will seem to have just like a giant improvement.”

Now that Tesla is moving closer to the completion of Dojo, Karpathy talked about the Neural Network, Supercomputers, and the excellent work of Tesla’s Supercomputing team.

In Karpathy’s presentation, the AI head stated that there are three main factors to get a Neural Network signal to work: Large amounts of video, clean data, and diverse scenarios to make the suite as well-rounded as possible. It is evident that through Tesla’s decision to make its two mass-market vehicles vision-based, that large amounts of data is one of the biggest factors. The Model 3 and Model Y have dominated Tesla’s sales numbers globally for some time, meaning they contribute more data to the Neural Network than the other two vehicles in Tesla’s fleet.

Now that Dojo has been in development for some time, Karpathy unveiled some details about the Supercomputer that Tesla uses for data consumption and storage. A slide in the presentation details the specifications:

  • 720 nodes of 8x A100 80 GB (5760 GPUs total)
  • 1.8 EFLOPS (720 nodes * 312 TFLOPS-FP16-A100 * 8 GPU/nodes)
  • 10 PB of “hot tier” NVME storage @ 1.6 TBps
  • 640 Tbps of total switching capacity

Credit: Yarrow B. | YouTube

Karpathy said that these specs make it “roughly the number five Supercomputer in the world” during his presentation.

Now, Dojo is still not released, and Karpathy was unwilling to comment further on the progress or any of the finer points of what will likely bring Tesla close to Level 5 autonomy. Still, there should be more details in the coming months. Tesla has stuck by the 2021 time frame for Dojo since first talking about it, so hopefully, the company will shed more detail on it during the Q2 or Q3 2021 Earnings Call.

Karpathy’s full presentation is available below.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo

SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.

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SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.

The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.

The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.

Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.

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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.

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Tesla Model Y L’s new features flexed at unveiling event at Diner

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Tesla Model Y L in a field
Credit: Tesla

Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.

Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990

Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.

However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.

Multi-Row Climate Control

Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:

Better Rear Window Visibility

One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.

Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:

PowerShare will be included

Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.

Wireless Charging Pad

There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.

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Tesla owner fixes common feature complaint with crafty DIY retrofit

Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.

Thermal Management Improvements

These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:

  • Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
  • +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
  • 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
  • 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin

Demand

Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with

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  • 1 year of FSD Supervised
  • 1 year of Supercharging
  • 1 year of Premium Connectivity
  • Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
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