Last Updated on: 10th August 2025, 01:15 am
We’ve got a couple of stories this week regarding robotaxis that might indicate a little bit of a pumping of the brakes on the robot revolution. Perhaps they are no big deal in the long run, but they are not exactly positive surprises.
Robotaxi Falls Into Construction Pit
Social media was apparently ablaze this week in China after a robotaxi ended up in a construction pit. It was a Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi, and it was indeed transporting a paying passenger. It’s not clear how the robotaxi ended up at the bottom of this construction pit, but there were reportedly barriers and warning signs around the pit.
Luckily, the passenger was not injured, but local residents reportedly had to use a ladder to help her out of the robotaxi.
Naturally, this incident has sparked a lot of concern and discussion around whether robotaxis are actually ready for mass deployment. Yes, they can mostly do what they’re supposed to do on their own, but the fact that one ended up at the bottom of a construction pit with the passenger needing rescued has spooked people for some reason.
Even if the stats overall look very good for robotaxis, a blatantly bad and scary incident like this could drive many people away from the technology. (No pun intended.)
Tesla Dojo Dead
One of the things Tesla fans/shareholders have been most excited about in recent years has been Tesla’s “Dojo.” This was supposed to be the supercomputer that would be critical to Tesla perfecting Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD). Elon Musk also speculated that they could make money on this Dojo training behemoth by selling use and services to other companies at some point. Though, that’s not happening, because Tesla has ended its Dojo program and is changing course.
“Tesla Dojo no more: The carmaker is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team, upending the company’s effort to develop in-house AI chips for autonomous driving. The move means Tesla will increase its reliance on partners including Nvidia, AMD and Samsung,” Bloomberg writes.
Reuters adds that “Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Jonas valued the Dojo supercomputer at $500 billion in 2023, saying it opened a new market for the automaker beyond cars sales, similar to how Amazon’s cloud unit boosts profit for the ecommerce firm.” A $500 billion value. “Dojo is the key accelerant at the intersection of hardware and software,” Morgan Stanley wrote on August 4. Whoops.
Here’s more on what Tesla’s Dojo was, from Wikipedia:
“Tesla Dojo was a supercomputer designed and built by Tesla for computer vision video processing and recognition.[1] It was used for training Tesla’s machine learning models to improve its Full Self-Driving (FSD) advanced driver-assistance system. According to Tesla, it went into production in July 2023.[2]
“Dojo’s goal was to efficiently process millions of terabytes of video data captured from real-life driving situations from Tesla’s 4+ million cars.[3] This goal led to a considerably different architecture than conventional supercomputer designs.[4][5]“
Elon Musk referenced Dojo recently even, on the company’s Q2 2025 financials call. “Thinking about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it seems like, intuitively, we want to try to find convergence there, where it’s basically the same chip,” he said.
The head of Dojo, Steve Bannon, is leaving Tesla. Several members of the Dojo team are also reportedly about to launch a new startup, DensityAI. “The new startup is reportedly coming out of stealth soon and is building chips, hardware, and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents, and in automotive applications. DensityAI was founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering,” TechCrunch writes.
Is Tesla stock going to crash through the floor on the news of Tesla dissolving its Dojo team? Almost definitely not. Meme stocks just keep on meming. Dojo may have been the key to Tesla’s bright future 1–3 years ago, but now that Dojo has failed, it’ll just be something else.
Dojo or no Dojo, Tesla’s compute costs for its Full Self Driving tech keep going up and up and up. The idea is that all of this will pay off before the financial weight of the initiative crushes the company. But will it?
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