Nvidia introduced new self-driving vehicle technology as it aims to expand AI integration across more products
Nvidia has introduced a new technology platform for autonomous vehicles as the global chip leader looks to expand AI into real-world products.
Speaking at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, CEO Jensen Huang said the system—called Alpaca—will bring “reasoning” to autonomous vehicles.
Huang claimed it will allow cars to “think about rare situations, drive safely in challenging environments, and explain their driving decisions.”
He said Nvidia is working with Mercedes-Benz to build a driverless car powered by this technology, which will be released in the US in the coming months and then launched in Europe and Asia.
Nvidia’s chips have helped power the AI revolution, although much of the focus so far has been on the software they power, such as ChatGPT.
However, big tech companies are now increasingly looking to hardware—meaning physical products like cars—in which to deploy AI.
Physical AI reaches its own ‘ChatGPT moment’
Wearing his signature black leather jacket, Huang told hundreds of attendees that the project had taught Nvidia “a lot” about helping partners build robotic systems.
“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is almost here,” Huang said. “Nvidia’s push to differentiate itself with large-scale AI and AI systems will help it stay far ahead of the competition,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight in Las Vegas.
“Alpaca is a game-changer for Nvidia, which has transformed from primarily a compute provider to a platform provider for the physical AI ecosystem.” Shares of the AI chip designer rose slightly in after-hours trading following Huang’s presentation.
The presentation included a video demonstration of an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco, with a passenger sitting behind the steering wheel with their hands in their lap.
Huang said, “It works 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 tells you why it’s going to do it.”
Huang said that Alpaca is an open-source AI model, and its 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.
He told the audience, “Our vision is that one day, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous.” This project could pose a threat to companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla, which offers driver assistance software called Autopilot.
Following the announcement of Alpaca, Musk posted on social media, “Okay, this is what Tesla is doing.” “They will find that getting to 99% is easy, and then solving the long tail of the distribution is incredibly difficult.”
Like Tesla, Nvidia also plans to launch a robotaxi service with a partner next year, but it declined to name the partner or specify where the service would be available.
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of over $4.5 trillion (£3.3 trillion).
It briefly became the first company to reach $5 trillion in October, but its value has since fallen amid concerns that demand for AI might be overstated. The company also announced that its Rubin AI chips are currently in development and are expected to be released later this year.
The highly anticipated hardware is designed to perform computations using less energy than Nvidia’s current line of AI chips, potentially lowering the costs of developing the technology.
