Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

In this articleTSLA your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTChristina Locopo | CNBCTesla's vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.Bannon was leading the development of Tesla's Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk

Bloomberg first reported on Bannon's departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for .Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince holders that Tesla, his only publicly traded , is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company

A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to cess and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.Tesla's focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to imve the company's advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally der on his mise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.On Tesla's earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be "operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents," referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia's state of the art chips.Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to duce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco

In Austin, the company's vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary

In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a "Tesla Robotaxi" app.On the earnings call, Musk faced questions how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.Musk said the companies "are doing different things." He said, "xAI is doing terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models." Tesla uses "100x smaller models," he said, with the automaker focused on "real-world AI," for its cars and robots and xAI focused on software that strives for "artificial super intelligence."Musk also said that some engineers wouldn't join Tesla because "they wanted to work on AGI," one reason he said he formed a new company.Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations