Nvidia has announced the integration of its technology into self-driving cars, aiming to expand the range of physical products into which AI can be integrated, UNN reports with reference to the BBC.
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Speaking at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, company head Jensen Huang stated that the automotive technology, named Alpamayo, will bring "reasoning" to autonomous vehicles.
This will allow cars to "reason through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex conditions, and explain their decisions," Huang said.
He added that Nvidia is working with Mercedes to create a self-driving car based on this technology, which will be released in the US in the coming months, and then appear in Europe and Asia.
Nvidia chips have fueled the AI revolution, although until now the main focus has been on the software they support, such as ChatGPT.
However, leading technology companies are now increasingly looking for hardware, i.e., physical products such as cars, in which AI could be used.
In his signature black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project had taught Nvidia "a tremendous amount of things" about how to help partners build robotic systems.
"The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is almost here," Huang said.
"NVIDIA's shift to large-scale AI and leveraging AI systems as a competitive advantage will help it significantly outpace competitors," said Paolo Pescatore, a PP Foresight analyst from Las Vegas.
"Alpamayo is a profound shift for NVIDIA, moving from a predominantly computational product to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems," he noted.
Shares of the AI chip developer rose slightly in after-hours trading after Huang's presentation.
It showed a video demonstration of an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco, while a passenger sitting behind the wheel kept their hands on their lap.
"It behaves so naturally because it was trained directly by human demonstrators," Huang said, "but in every single scenario… it tells you what it intends to do and reasons about what it intends to do."
Alpamayo is an open-source artificial intelligence model whose base code is now available on the Hugging Face machine learning platform, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and retrain the model, Huang said.
"Our goal is that someday every car, every truck will be autonomous," he told the audience.
The project could threaten companies like Elon Musk's Tesla, which offers driver assistance software called Autopilot.
"This is what Tesla does," Musk wrote on social media after the Alpamayo announcement. "They will find that it is easy to achieve 99%, and then incredibly difficult to solve the long-tail distribution problem."
Like Tesla, Nvidia also plans to launch a robotaxi service by next year in partnership with a partner, but declined to name the partner or say where it would be located.
Nvidia is the world's most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of over $4.5 trillion.
In October, it became the first company to reach the $5 trillion mark, but then lost value due to fears that AI demand was overinflated.
The company also announced that its Rubin AI chips are currently in production and are expected to be released later this year.
This long-awaited hardware could consume less power than Nvidia's current line of AI chips and could reduce the cost of developing the technology.
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