Self-driving cars in India could become reality thanks to NVIDIA
What's the story
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that the company's latest Alpamayo family of AI models, could make self-driving cars a reality in India. The models were unveiled earlier this year at CES and come with simulation tools and datasets to speed up the development of autonomous vehicles. Huang stressed that their advanced reasoning capabilities can enable autonomous driving even in challenging environments like India.
Innovation
Reasoning-led AI to tackle complex driving situations
Huang described the Alpamayo technology as a revolutionary new approach called 'thinking.' He said, "For the very first time, we have added to the car the ability to reason...the way we humans do." Unlike traditional systems that rely on pre-defined rules or large-scale pattern matching, Alpamayo uses reasoning-led AI to tackle complex and unfamiliar driving situations.
Deployment
Mercedes-Benz S-Class comes with NVIDIA's Level-4 autonomous driving platform
The latest-generation of Mercedes-Benz's flagship S-Class sedan comes with NVIDIA's autonomous driving platform, powered by the latter's full-stack DRIVE AV Level-4 software. Just recently, the Mercedes-Benz CLA emerged as a top performer in Euro NCAP evaluations for its overall vehicle safety based on active and passive safety systems fitted in cars.
Tech foundation
Alpamayo is the world's 1st reasoning car, says Huang
NVIDIA, the global leader in AI computing, says its autonomous driving suite is made on a broader autonomous vehicle (AV) foundation. This includes advanced perception, planning, as well as reasoning technologies validated for production vehicles. Huang emphasized that with their Alpamayo technology, Mercedes-Benz is among the safest autonomous platforms in the world. He highlighted its reasoning-led AI as a key differentiator from other players like Tesla who are "quite far behind."
Analogy
Reasoning is the key differentiator for Alpamayo
Drawing a parallel with the human cognition, Huang explained that when people face unfamiliar situations, they break them down step by step into simpler problems they know how to solve. "We take complicated environments and decompose them into a series of easy-to-understand scenarios," he said. He also added that "humans have that reasoning capability, and Alpamayo is the world's first reasoning car."
Global impact
Reasoning-led AI will help scale autonomous driving globally
Huang said he expects reasoning-led AI to play a key role in scaling autonomous driving internationally, even in countries traditionally considered too complex for self-driving technologies. He was confident that if they can drive in those environments, AI will learn how to navigate through reasoning. "I fully expect that we are going to be able to apply this technology all over the world quite quickly," he added.