AI chip giant Nvidia has announced a major expansion into autonomous vehicle technology with the launch of its new AI-powered platform for self-driving cars. The company is partnering with Mercedes-Benz to produce a driverless car in competition with Waymo, Tesla, and other tech giants. CEO Jensen Huang says, “Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous.”
Nvidia, the world’s leading chip-maker, revealed its “Alpamayo” system at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, marking a strategic shift toward embedding AI into more physical products beyond software applications. Speaking at the event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company is partnering with Mercedes-Benz to produce a driverless car powered by the new technology, with plans for a United States release in the coming months before expanding to Europe and Asia.
The Alpamayo platform represents what Huang described as bringing “reasoning” capabilities to autonomous vehicles. According to the Nvidia chief executive, this advanced functionality would enable cars to “think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions.”
The announcement comes as major technology companies increasingly seek hardware applications for artificial intelligence beyond the software products that have dominated recent attention, such as ChatGPT. Nvidia’s chips have been instrumental in powering the current AI revolution, though most focus has centered on software implementations until now.
Huang told the CES audience that working on the autonomous vehicle project has taught Nvidia “an enormous amount” about helping partners build robotic systems. He suggested that the industry is approaching a critical milestone, stating, “The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is almost here.”
The presentation included a video demonstration showcasing an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz navigating through San Francisco streets while a passenger sat behind the steering wheel with their hands resting in their lap. Huang explained the system’s capabilities, noting, “It drives so naturally because it learned directly from human demonstrators, but in every single scenario it tells you what it’s going to do, and it reasons about what it’s about to do.”
Industry analyst Paolo Pescatore from PP Foresight offered his assessment of the announcement. “NVIDIA’s pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals,” Pescatore said. He characterized Alpamayo as “a profound shift for NVIDIA, moving from being primarily a compute to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems.”
In a significant move for the autonomous vehicle research community, Nvidia has made Alpamayo an open-source AI model. The underlying code is now available on machine learning platform Hugging Face, where researchers working on autonomous vehicles can access it free of charge and retrain the model according to their needs.
Huang expressed an ambitious vision for the future of transportation, telling the audience, “Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous.” Beyond the Mercedes partnership, Nvidia has revealed plans to launch a robotaxi service by next year in collaboration with an unnamed partner. The company has declined to provide details about the partner’s identity or the service’s location.
The Alpamayo announcement drew immediate reaction from competitors in the autonomous vehicle space. Elon Musk, whose company Tesla offers driver assistance software called Autopilot, responded on social media following the announcement. “Well that’s just exactly what Tesla is doing,” Musk posted, adding a cautionary note: “What they will find is that it’s easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.”
The self-driving car platform was not the only major announcement from Nvidia at the conference. The company also revealed that its Rubin AI chips are currently in manufacturing and scheduled for release later this year. These highly-anticipated processors represent a significant advancement in efficiency, capable of computing while using less energy than Nvidia’s current line of AI chips. This improved energy efficiency could potentially reduce the cost of developing AI technology.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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