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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:

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“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:

“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.”

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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.

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Karpathy’s full presentation is available below.

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

Elon Musk hints Tesla investors will be rewarded heavily

“Hold onto your Tesla stock. It’s going to be worth a lot, I think. That’s my bet,” Musk said.

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Credit: Grok

Elon Musk recently hinted that he believes Tesla investors will be rewarded heavily if they continue to hold onto their shares, and he reiterated that in a new interview that the company released on its social accounts this week.

Musk is one of the most successful CEOs in the modern era and has mammothed competitors on the Forbes Net Worth List over the past year as his holdings in his various companies have continued to swell.

Tesla investors, especially those who have been holding shares for several years, have also felt substantial gains in their portfolios. Over the past five years, the stock is up over 78 percent. Since February 2019, nearly seven years ago to the day, the stock is up over 1,800 percent.

Musk said in the interview:

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“Hold onto your Tesla stock. It’s going to be worth a lot, I think. That’s my bet.”

It’s no secret Musk has been extremely bullish on his own companies, but Tesla in particular, because it is publicly traded.

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However, the company has so many amazing projects that have an opportunity to revolutionize their respective industries. There is certainly a path to major growth on Wall Street for Tesla through its various future projects, including Optimus, Cybercab, Semi, and Unsupervised FSD.

  • Optimus (Tesla’s humanoid robot): Musk has discussed its potential for tasks like childcare, walking dogs, or assisting elderly parents, positioning it as a massive long-term driver of company value.
  • Cybercab (Tesla’s robotaxi/autonomous ride-hailing vehicle): a fully autonomous vehicle geared specifically for Tesla’s ride-sharing ambitions.
  • Semi (Tesla’s electric truck, with mentions of expansion, like in Europe): brings Tesla into the commercial logistics sector.
  • Unsupervised FSD (Full Self-Driving software achieving full autonomy without human supervision): turns every Tesla owner’s vehicle into a fully-autonomous vehicle upon release

These projects specifically are some of the highest-growth pillars Tesla has ever attempted to develop, especially in Musk’s eyes, as he has said Optimus will be the best-selling product of all-time.

Many analysts agree, but the bullish ones, like Cathie Wood of ARK Invest, are perhaps the one who believes Tesla has incredible potential on Wall Street, predicting a $2,600 price target for 2030, but this is not even including Optimus.

She told Bloomberg last March that she believes that the project will present a potential additive if Tesla can scale faster than anticipated.

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Cybertruck

Tesla drops latest hint that new Cybertruck trim is selling like hotcakes

According to Tesla’s Online Design Studio, the new All-Wheel-Drive Cybertruck will now be delivered in April 2027. Earlier orders are still slated for early this Summer, but orders from here on forward are now officially pushed into next year:

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(Credit: Tesla)

Tesla’s new Cybertruck offering has had its delivery date pushed back once again. This is now the second time, and deliveries for the newest orders are now pushed well into 2027.

According to Tesla’s Online Design Studio, the new All-Wheel-Drive Cybertruck will now be delivered in April 2027. Earlier orders are still slated for early this Summer, but orders from here on forward are now officially pushed into next year:

Just three days ago, the initial delivery date of June 2026 was pushed back to early Fall, and now, that date has officially moved to April 2027.

The fact that Tesla has had to push back deliveries once again proves one of two things: either Tesla has slow production plans for the new Cybertruck trim, or demand is off the charts.

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Judging by how Tesla is already planning to raise the price based on demand in just a few days, it seems like the company knows it is giving a tremendous deal on this spec of Cybertruck, and units are moving quickly.

That points more toward demand and not necessarily to slower production plans, but it is not confirmed.

Tesla Cybertruck’s newest trim will undergo massive change in ten days, Musk says

Tesla is set to hike the price on March 1, so tomorrow will be the final day to grab the new Cybertruck trim for just $59,990.

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It features:

  • Dual Motor AWD w/ est. 325 mi of range
  • Powered tonneau cover
  • Bed outlets (2x 120V + 1x 240V) & Powershare capability
  • Coil springs w/ adaptive damping
  • Heated first-row seats w/ textile material that is easy to clean
  • Steer-by-wire & Four Wheel Steering
  • 6’ x 4’ composite bed
  • Towing capacity of up to 7,500 lbs
  • Powered frunk

Interestingly, the price offering is fairly close to what Tesla unveiled back in late 2019.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk outlines plan for first Starship tower catch attempt

Musk confirmed that Starship V3 Ship 1 (SN1) is headed for ground tests and expressed strong confidence in the updated vehicle design.

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Credit: SpaceX/X

Elon Musk has clarified when SpaceX will first attempt to catch Starship’s upper stage with its launch tower. The CEO’s update provides the clearest teaser yet for the spacecraft’s recovery roadmap.

Musk shared the details in recent posts on X. In his initial post, Musk confirmed that Starship V3 Ship 1 (SN1) is headed for ground tests and expressed strong confidence in the updated vehicle design.

“Starship V3 SN1 headed for ground tests. I am highly confident that the V3 design will achieve full reusability,” Musk wrote.

In a follow-up post, Musk addressed when SpaceX would attempt to catch the upper stage using the launch tower’s robotic arms. 

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“Should note that SpaceX will only try to catch the ship with the tower after two perfect soft landings in the ocean. The risk of the ship breaking up over land needs to be very low,” Musk clarified. 

His remarks suggest that SpaceX is deliberately reducing risk before attempting a tower catch of Starship’s upper stage. Such a milestone would mark a major step towards the full reuse of the Starship system.

SpaceX is currently targeting the first Starship V3 flight of 2026 this coming March. The spacecraft’s V3 iteration is widely viewed as a key milestone in SpaceX’s long-term strategy to make Starship fully reusable. 

Starship V3 features a number of key upgrades over its previous iterations. The vehicle is equipped with SpaceX’s Raptor V3 engines, which are designed to deliver significantly higher thrust than earlier versions while reducing cost and weight. 

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The V3 design is also expected to be optimized for manufacturability, a critical step if SpaceX intends to scale the spacecraft’s production toward frequent launches for Starlink, lunar missions, and eventually Mars. 

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