The biggest story in AI right now is one that hardly anyone is talking about.
Yet, it involves the world’s richest men, the world’s most powerful companies, and the world’s fastest computers.
It is the highest stakes story in AI yet. It will determine the winners and losers of the AI Boom in 2024.
And it all starts with Tesla (TSLA) and a little program called “Dojo.”
Dojo is Tesla’s supercomputer. It is the “brain” behind Tesla’s self-driving operations. It is fed all the driving data from Tesla cars on the road, crunches through this data, and develops self-driving algorithms that power the autonomous vehicle capabilities in Tesla cars.
Dojo is Tesla’s AI.
It is very cool technology. Why can Tesla cars drive themselves everywhere, while no other car out there features full self-driving capability? Because of Dojo.
It is an AI focused exclusively on creating autonomous vehicles, with access to the most self-driving data in the world through Tesla cars, and built and refined by some of the top AI engineers in the world.
Project Dojo is arguably the most important technology for unlocking the future of the global automotive market.
But it is also much more than that.
It marks a tipping point for the AI Revolution.
The Custom AI Revolution
Up until now, nearly every AI application out there has been built on GPUs from Nvidia (NVDA). The semiconductor firm has cemented itself as the maker of the best general-purpose AI chips out there, and nearly every major AI model in the world today has consequently been built on top of Nvidia chips.
Dojo marks an important departure from that norm.
Tesla used to power all of its self-driving operations with a large Nvidia GPU-based supercomputer. Dojo is set to replace that.
In other words, Tesla – like everyone else – used to use Nvidia GPUs to power its AI. Now, however, they’ve developed their own Dojo supercomputer that uses their own GPUs custom-built for Tesla’s AI needs.
And that gets to the core theme of the second wave of the AI Boom that Dojo is ushering in right now: customization.
The first wave of the AI Boom played out in 2023, and it was all about a race to build general-purpose and broad AI models. Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), etc. – they didn’t care what AI models they were building; they just all wanted to build some sort of AI model to get their foot in the door of the AI Boom.
But Dojo marks a critical shift into the second wave of the AI Boom – one that will transform the industry in 2024 and beyond.
Dojo isn’t a broad, general-purpose AI model. It is a narrow, task-specific AI model focused exclusively on creating AI to power self-driving cars.
It is custom AI.
To power this custom AI, Tesla is building its own custom chips.
They aren’t alone.
Amazon has developed two AI chips customized specifically for building AI models on the firm’s cloud service, AWS. One is for high-performance inference (AWS Inferentia) and one is for deep-learning training (AWS Trainium). Together, Amazon believes these two AI chips could power all AI functions on AWS in the future.
Meanwhile, Alphabet is already on the fifth generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, for neural network development. These custom AI chips are built specifically to optimize the integration of AI into search and advertising.
Microsoft has reportedly invested heavily in its own secretive AI chip development project, codenamed Athena. And Meta is developing its own custom chip for running AI models, dubbed the MTIA chip – or Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chip.
The Final Word on Custom AI
The world’s most important tech companies have made their move. They’re going all-in on AI, and none of them want to depend on Nvidia to help them win the AI Race.
They all want to do it themselves.
Welcome to the era of Custom AI.
In this new era of the AI Boom, the big winners of 2023 – like Nvidia – won’t shine quite as bright. There will be a huge reshuffling in the industry – a changing of the guard, if you will.
Who will win in this changing of the guard? Which stocks should you buy as Project Dojo rewrites the rules of the $15.7 trillion AI Revolution in 2024?
Become part of the revolution today.
On the date of publication, Luke Lango did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.