Nvidia unveils ‘reasoning’ AI technology for self-driving cars
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang on Monday announced Alpamayo, a tech platform the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans.
“Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions,” Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas.
Huang also said Nvidia has begun producing a driverless car powered by its technology, the Mercedes-Benz CLA, in partnership with the German automaker.
The vehicle will be released in the US in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia.
Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project has taught Nvidia “an enormous amount” about how to help partners build robotic systems.
Analysts say the announcement reinforces Nvidia’s leadership in integrating AI hardware and software, deepening its push into physical AI.
“NVIDIA’s pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals,” said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight, from 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 AI chip designer rose slightly in after-hours trading following Huang’s presentation.
It featured a video demonstration of the AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco while a passenger, sat behind the steering wheel, kept their hands in their lap.
“It drives so naturally because it learned directly from human demonstrators,” Huang said, “but in every single scenario… it tells you what it’s going to do, and it reasons about what it’s about to do.”
Alpamayo is an open-source AI model, with the underlying code now available on machine learning platform Hugging Face, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and retrain the model, Huang said.
“Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single 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.
“Well that’s just exactly what Tesla is doing,” Musk posted on social media following the Alpamayo announcement. “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.”
Like Tesla, Nvidia also has plans to launch a robotaxi service by next year in collaboration with a partner, but has declined to name the partner or say where it will be.