Nvidia has unveiled a new self-driving car technology platform. The world’s leading chipmaker wants to expand the number of physical products to incorporate artificial intelligence.
This is reported by the BBC.
The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that the Alpamayo system will bring “understanding” to autonomous vehicles. It should allow cars to think through rare scenarios, drive safely under challenging conditions, and explain their decisions.
Alpamayo is an open-source artificial intelligence model, with its base code now available on the Hugging Face machine learning platform, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and retrain the model.
Nvidia is working with Mercedes to create a self-driving car based on this technology. It will be released in the US in the coming months, followed by Europe and Asia.
Nvidia chips have helped drive the AI revolution, though the focus has so far largely been on software such as ChatGPT. But leading tech companies are increasingly looking to hardware (i.e., physical products like cars) that can harness AI.
The project could pose a threat to companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla, which offers self-driving software called Autopilot. Like Tesla, Nvidia also plans to launch a robotaxi service with a partner by next year, but declined to name the partner or say where it will be based.