C-Suite Exodus At Tesla? After Dojo Supercomputer Lead's Rumored Exit, AI Infra Head Tim Zaman Jumps Ship To Google's DeepMind

As Tesla, Inc. TSLA navigates through fundamental challenges precipitated by economic woes, it must contend with another problem. In a span of two months, the company has lost two key executives.

What Happened: On Friday, Tesla’s AI Infra & AI Platform Engineering Manager Tim Zaman said in a post on X that he is joining Alphabet, Inc. GOOGL GOOG unit DeepMind. Zaman worked at the Elon Musk-led company for four years, beginning in 2019. He also simultaneously held the profile of “ML Foundations Engineering Manager” at X for a year after Musk bought the social media platform.

Before his tenure at Tesla, he worked as an AI infra systems software engineer at Nvidia for three years.

“I’m joining Google DeepMind this Monday. Excited to be a kid among legends!” he said in the post.

A Bloomberg report noted on Thursday that Tesla’s head of the Dojo supercomputer project, Ganesh Venkataramanan, left the company in November after leading it for five years. Peter Bannon, a Tesla veteran, has since taken over, it added.

Benzinga’s inquiry to Tesla regarding the report went unanswered.

See Also: Everything You Need To Know About Tesla Stock

Why It’s Important: AI is key to Tesla’s autonomous driving ambitions, and the technology is used to develop and deploy autonomy on scale in its EVs and Tesla bot, among other things. Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest, which has a $2,000 price target for Tesla shares by 2027, sees robotaxis contributing to the bulk of the valuation upside for Tesla.

“Tesla, we think [is] the largest AI project in the world,” Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood said in a CNBC interview in October.

Given the importance of AI for Tesla, it remains to be seen if Zaman’s departure will pose a setback to the company’s AI ambitions. Andrej Karpathy, who served as Tesla’s AI chief, quit in July 2022, and subsequently joined OpenAI.

Commenting on Venkataramanan’s departure, Future Fund co-founder Gary Black said this, combined with Musk’s more cautious full-self driving comments in the recent DealBook interview, reinforced his view that it is premature to include robotaxi in Tesla's valuation, despite the bulls' insistence that it be included. In the interview, the Tesla chief did not provide definitive timing and referred to FSD as “supervised” full self driving, Black noted.

The Dojo supercomputer is used to train Tesla’s fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Tesla ended Friday’s session up 0.49% at $243.84, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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