Robotaxi Falls Into Development Pit, Tesla Dojo Lifeless

Final Up to date on: tenth August 2025, 01:15 am

We’ve obtained a few tales this week concerning robotaxis that may point out somewhat little bit of a pumping of the brakes on the robotic revolution. Maybe they’re no large deal in the long term, however they aren’t precisely constructive surprises.

Robotaxi Falls Into Development Pit

Social media was apparently ablaze this week in China after a robotaxi ended up in a building pit. It was a Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi, and it was certainly transporting a paying passenger. It’s not clear how the robotaxi ended up on the backside of this building pit, however there have been reportedly obstacles and warning indicators across the pit.

Fortunately, the passenger was not injured, however native residents reportedly had to make use of a ladder to assist her out of the robotaxi.

Naturally, this incident has sparked a number of concern and dialogue round whether or not robotaxis are literally prepared for mass deployment. Sure, they will principally do what they’re alleged to do on their very own, however the truth that one ended up on the backside of a building pit with the passenger needing rescued has spooked folks for some cause.

Even when the stats general look superb for robotaxis, a blatantly dangerous and scary incident like this might drive many individuals away from the expertise. (No pun meant.)

Tesla Dojo Lifeless

One of many issues Tesla followers/shareholders have been most enthusiastic about in recent times has been Tesla’s “Dojo.” This was alleged to be the supercomputer that might be crucial to Tesla perfecting Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD). Elon Musk additionally speculated that they may make cash on this Dojo coaching behemoth by promoting use and providers to different corporations sooner or later. Although, that’s not occurring, as a result of Tesla has ended its Dojo program and is altering course.

“Tesla Dojo no extra: The carmaker is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer crew, upending the corporate’s effort to develop in-house AI chips for autonomous driving. The transfer means Tesla will enhance its reliance on companions together with Nvidia, AMD and Samsung,” Bloomberg writes.

Reuters provides that “Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Jonas valued the Dojo supercomputer at $500 billion in 2023, saying it opened a brand new marketplace for the automaker past vehicles gross sales, much like how Amazon’s cloud unit boosts revenue for the ecommerce agency.” A $500 billion worth. “Dojo is the important thing accelerant on the intersection of {hardware} and software program,” Morgan Stanley wrote on August 4. Whoops.

Right here’s extra on what Tesla’s Dojo was, from Wikipedia:

“Tesla Dojo was a supercomputer designed and constructed by Tesla for laptop imaginative and prescient video processing and recognition.^[1] It was used for coaching Tesla’s machine studying fashions to enhance its Full Self-Driving (FSD) superior driver-assistance system. In keeping with Tesla, it went into manufacturing in July 2023.^[2]

“Dojo’s objective was to effectively course of tens of millions of terabytes of video information captured from real-life driving conditions from Tesla’s 4+ million vehicles.^[3] This objective led to a significantly completely different structure than typical supercomputer designs.^[4][5]“

Elon Musk referenced Dojo just lately even, on the corporate’s Q2 2025 financials name. “Fascinated by Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it looks as if, intuitively, we need to attempt to discover convergence there, the place it’s principally the identical chip,” he stated.

The top of Dojo, Steve Bannon, is leaving Tesla. A number of members of the Dojo crew are additionally reportedly about to launch a brand new startup, DensityAI. “The brand new startup is reportedly popping out of stealth quickly and is constructing chips, {hardware}, and software program that may energy information facilities for AI which might be utilized in robotics, by AI brokers, and in automotive purposes. DensityAI was based by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla staff Invoice Chang and Ben Floering,” TechCrunch writes.

Is Tesla inventory going to crash via the ground on the information of Tesla dissolving its Dojo crew? Virtually positively not. Meme shares simply carry on meming. Dojo could have been the important thing to Tesla’s vivid future 1–3 years in the past, however now that Dojo has failed, it’ll simply be one thing else.

Dojo or no Dojo, Tesla’s compute prices for its Full Self Driving tech hold going up and up and up. The thought is that every one of it will repay earlier than the monetary weight of the initiative crushes the corporate. However will it?