October 21, 2024 – Tesla has recently witnessed another significant change in its upper management ranks as Eric Quinnell, the engineer spearheading the Dojo AI supercomputer project, announced his departure from the electric vehicle giant.
Quinnell took to LinkedIn to share the news of his exit, expressing “heavy heart” emotions as he bid farewell to Tesla. Alongside his farewell message, he included a creative fill-in-the-blanks “farewell email” template for others to use.
During his nearly four-year stint at Tesla, Quinnell played a pivotal role in developing the Dojo Fabric supercomputer and Tesla’s Ethernet Transport Protocol (TTPoE). Notably, Tesla had open-sourced the TTPoE protocol just a month ago.
In his next career move, Quinnell will be joining Tranium. Before Tesla, he spent over six years at Samsung Austin R&D Center, another six-plus years at AMD, and a brief stint of more than a year at semiconductor design company Arm.
His farewell email revealed some previously undisclosed information about Tesla’s Dojo project. According to Quinnell, the Dojo cluster currently boasts a computing power of 15 EFLOPS, and the team behind it comprises approximately 150 members.
This news comes as Tesla navigates a series of high-level changes. Earlier this month, the company elevated Ashok Elluswamy, the former Autopilot director, to the role of Vice President of AI Software. Just a day later, Milan Kovic was appointed as the Vice President of the Optimus humanoid robot project. He previously led Autopilot software engineering. Additionally, Omead Afshar has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Sales and Manufacturing.
Tesla has also seen multiple executive departures this year. Most recently, Sreela Venkataratnam, Vice President of Finance and Business Operations, concluded her 11-year journey with the company in August. In May, Renjue Zhu, the Manufacturing Director at Giga Texas, departed after five years of service.
Notably, in April, Drew Baglino, Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, left Tesla after an 18-year stint. Shortly after, Rohan Patel, Vice President of Public Policy, also exited the company after eight years.
