On 28-08-2021, The Tesla AI Day, one of the most anticipated events of the year, took place in front of a global audience. Experts and beginners alike have been speculating about what may happen during the event since Musk originally disclosed little information about it. The Tesla humanoid robot and the AI training chip D1 for Tesla’s supercomputer Dojo were two of the primary announcements made at this occasion.
At his gatherings, Musk likes to show off his engineers, and this time is no exception. The crowd couldn’t help but notice the handful of engineers Musk refers to as the Tesla AI team during the most recent iteration of Tesla AI day. Two Indian-origin engineers were also on the team.
Ganesh Venkatramanan
The most prominent figure at the Tesla AI Day event was Ganesh Venkataraman, a Senior Director Hardware at Tesla. Venkataramanan, who is also Project Dojo’s head, announced the Dojo supercomputer and revealed the Dojo D1 processor.
Musk had tasked the Venkataramanan-led team with developing a super-fast training computer capable of achieving the highest AI training performance, allowing for larger and more sophisticated neural network models with improved power and cost-efficiency a few years ago.
“For Dojo, we envisioned a vast computation plane filled with highly resilient compute components, a large pool of memory, and a high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric interconnecting everything.” At the event, Venkataramanan stated, “We wanted to approach this from top to bottom of the stack, and remove any bottlenecks at any of these layers.”
Given his outstanding professional resume, Venkataramanan, who has been with Tesla for five and a half years, appears to be a solid fit for directing one of Musk’s dream projects. He began his career at Tesla in 2016 as the director of Autopilot Hardware, a position he held for two years. After then, he was moved to senior director of Autopilot Hardware, where he is in charge of Project Dojo and the Silicon, Systems, and Firmware/Software departments.
Venkataramanan previously worked for AMD’s CPU group. He has been with the firm for more than 14 years. He started as a senior design engineer and rose through the ranks to become the Senior Director of Design Engineering, overseeing a staff of more than 200 highly experienced engineers. He was a member of the team that created many generations of x86 and ARM cores. His notable achievements include the creation of the first x86-64 chip, the first Dual-Core x86, and the Zen core. Venkataramanan has also worked with Analog Devices and Hexaware Technologies in the past.
Ashok Elluswamy
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, was present. Elluswamy presented an overview of the artificial intelligence technologies that underpin Tesla’s Autopilot driving system. He also used a photorealistic model to show off Tesla’s Cybertruck. The Cybertruck will not be produced until next year.
Elluswamy’s current responsibilities include designing large-scale autonomous ground truth pipelines to train neural networks, as well as generating strong, causal prediction models and producing an accurate, precise geometric description of the environment using AI and engineering models.
Elluswamy began his career at Tesla in 2014 as a software engineer in the Autopilot department, quickly rising through the ranks to become the team’s director. In fact, when Musk overhauled the Autopilot group in 2019, his name became widely known for the first time. According to accounts, Musk was dissatisfied with the group’s development, which led to the removal of a few notable individuals and the elevation of a few others. Elluswamy belonged to the latter group, and following the reorganisation, he was tasked with directing the perception and computer vision teams.
