Tim Zaman has left Tesla to work at Google DeepMind.
Zaman was the head of 'AI Infra' at the automotive company from 2019, and was deeply involved in deploying the company's Dojo supercomputers and GPU supercomputers.
He simultaneously spent a year at Twitter/X as the head of machine learning foundations. Elon Musk is the CEO of both X and Tesla, and has drafted employees from the latter company to help his new acquisition.
"Joined Nvidia in 2016, and Tesla in 2019. Like family, I never thought I'd leave," Zaman said on X. "My intuition pulls me to my next venture that has the ingredients to change the world - again.
"I'm joining Google DeepMind this Monday. Excited to be a kid among legends!"
The move comes days after Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini, its answer to OpenAI's GPT series of large language models.
It also comes on the back of Ganesh Venkataramanan, the project lead for Dojo, also leaving Tesla.
Dojo is the name for multiple Tesla supercomputers that use the company's custom D1-chips, designed by Venkataramanan's team and manufactured by TSMC.
The company first detailed Dojo in 2021, and installed the initial system in 2022. That version of Dojo has around 3,000 D1 chips, providing a total of 1.1 exaflops (BF16/CFP8) of performance.
The company now has several Dojo deployments across different data centers, and is building a Dojo data center at its HQ in Austin, Texas. An Austin-based job listing earlier this year called for "first-of-its-kind data centers."
