Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday announced Alpamayo, a technology platform that the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans.
“Alpamayo brings logic to self-driving vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments and explain their decisions,” Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas.
Huang also reported that Nvidia has partnered with a German automaker to produce a self-driving Mercedes-Benz CLA equipped with its technology.
The car will be launched in the US in the coming months, followed by Europe and Asia.
Wearing his signature black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project taught Nvidia “a ton” about how to help partners build robotic systems.
Analysts say the announcement strengthens Nvidia's leadership in integrating artificial intelligence hardware and software, deepening its push into physical artificial intelligence.
“NVIDIA's focus on scalable AI and AI systems as differentiators will help it stay ahead of the competition,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight in Las Vegas.
“Alpamayo represents a profound shift for NVIDIA, evolving from primarily a computing engine to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems.”
Shares of the artificial intelligence chip developer rose slightly in after-hours trading following Huang's presentation.
It showed a video demonstration of an AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco while the passenger behind the wheel kept his hands in his lap.
“He drives so naturally because he learned directly from the human demonstrators,” Huang said, “but in every single scenario … he tells you what he's going to do and talks about what he's going to do.”
Alpamayo is an open-source artificial intelligence model whose core code is now available on the 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 car, every truck will be autonomous,” he told the audience.
The project could pose a threat to companies such as Elon Musk's Tesla, which offers driver-assistance software called Autopilot.
“Well, that’s exactly what Tesla is doing,” Musk wrote on social media after Alpamayo’s announcement. “They will find that it is easy to reach 99% and then very difficult to solve the long tail of the distribution.”
Like Tesla, Nvidia also plans to launch a robotaxi service by next year in collaboration with a partner, but declined to name the partner or say where it would be located.
