Tesla is reportedly suing its former engineer Alexander Yatskov for allegedly stealing confidential and tightly guarded information connected to the company's supercomputer technology, called Project Dojo.
Tesla accuses Yatskov of downloading the information to his personal devices and refusing to surrender them.
Tesla Sues Former Engineer
Yatskov, who Tesla claims lied on his resume about his work history and skillset, began working for the electric vehicle maker as a thermal engineer in early 2022 and aided in designing Dojo's cooling systems.
Dojo is Tesla's neural net training computer that processes large amounts of data used to train the AI software in their self-driving cars, as first reported by Bloomberg.
According to the complaint, Yatskov had access to Dojo's cooling information, as well as other confidential information connected to the project.
Tesla says all engineers sign a non-disclosure agreement that should prevent them from disclosing or storing any confidential information about the project, which the automaker says Yatskov has violated by allegedly removing Tesla's confidential information from work devices and accounts.
He allegedly accessed it on his own personal devices and created the company's documents containing confidential Project Dojo details on a personal computer.
The automaker also says it discovered Yatskov sending emails with classified company information from his personal email address to his work email, according to The Verge.
As written in the complaint, Tesla claims Yatskov eventually admitted to storing classified information on his personal devices when the company confronted him about it.
The automaker then put Yatskov on administrative leave on Apr. 6 and asked him to bring in his devices so they could recover any stolen information.
Yatskov responded by allegedly providing Tesla with the wrong laptop in an attempt to conceal any type of evidence against him.
This dummy device contained none of the confidential information in question, and the laptop was made to look like it may have accessed only inoffensive company information, like company letters.
Yatskov resigned from his position on May 2. Tesla is suing Yatskov for compensatory and exemplary damages and seeking a court order that would force the former Tesla employee to return the classified information that he allegedly stole.
Tesla's Supercomputer
According to Electrek.co, Tesla described Dojo supercomputer as the fastest AI training machine in the world.
For years, Tesla has been teasing the development of a new supercomputer that is meant for neural net video training.
The automaker is currently handling a massive amount of video data from its fleet of more than 1 million electric vehicles, which it uses to train the neural nets.
The automaker found itself unsatisfied with current hardware options to train its computer vision neural nets, and they believed it could do better internally.
Since 2020, CEO Elon Musk has been teasing the development of Tesla's own supercomputer called "Dojo."
In 2021, he even teased that Tesla's Dojo would have a capacity of over an exaflop, which is one quintillion floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS.
It could potentially makes Tesla's Dojo the new most powerful supercomputer in the world.
Related Article: Tesla Dojo: Zero Accidents on the Road Once It Develops, Elon Musk Stresses Importance on Whitepaper
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Written by Sophie Webster
