Nvidia unveils self-driving car tech as part of physical AI push
Nvidia has introduced a new technology platform for driverless cars, as the world’s leading chipmaker looks for more physical products to embed artificial intelligence into.
Speaking at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, boss Jensen Huan said the system, called Alpamayo, would bring “reasoning” to autonomous vehicles.
Huang claimed this would allow cars to “think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain driving decisions.”
He said Nvidia is working with Mercedes to produce a self-driving car powered by the technology, which will be launched in the US in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia.
Nvidia’s chips have helped power the AI revolution, but so far the spotlight has mostly focused on the software it supports, like ChatGPT.
However, leading technology firms are now increasingly looking for hardware (i.e. physical products such as cars) where AI can be used.
Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project had taught Nvidia “a lot” about how to help partners build robotic systems.
“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is almost here,” Huang said.
“NVIDIA’s push towards AI at scale and AI systems as a differentiator will help it stay well ahead of its competitors,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight in Las Vegas.
“Alpamayo represents a profound shift for NVIDIA, moving from being primarily a compute to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems.”
Shares of the artificial intelligence chip designer rose slightly in after-hours trading following Huang’s presentation.
It featured a video showing an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving in San Francisco while a passenger sitting behind the wheel kept their hands in their lap.
“It moves in a very natural way because it learns directly from human demonstrators, but in every scenario… it tells you what it’s going to do and reasons about what it’s about to do,” Huang said.
Huang said Alpamayo is an open-source AI model, and the underlying code is now available on the machine learning platform Hugging Face, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and retrain the model.
“Our vision is that one day every car, every truck will be autonomous,” he told the audience.
The project could pose a threat to companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla, which offers driver assistance software called Autopilot.
“This is exactly what Tesla is doing,” Musk said on social media after the Alpamayo announcement. “What they’ll find is that it’s easy to get to 99% and then it’s extremely difficult to figure out the long tail of distribution.”
Like Tesla, Nvidia It also plans to launch a robotaxi service in collaboration with a partner by next year, 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 more than $4.5 trillion (£3.3 trillion).
It became the first company to reach $5 trillion in value in October, but lost value due to concerns about whether artificial intelligence demand was overhyped.
