In a significant move that underscores the company’s ambitions in the realm of physical AI, Nvidia has unveiled its latest technology platform for autonomous vehicles. Dubbed “Alpamayo,” the system promises to bring a new level of “reasoning” capabilities to self-driving cars, allowing them to navigate complex environments safely and explain their driving decisions.
Speaking at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that the company is collaborating with Mercedes-Benz to produce a driverless car powered by the Alpamayo platform. This vehicle, set to be released in the US in the coming months before expanding to Europe and Asia, represents a major milestone in the quest for fully autonomous transportation.
Nvidia’s chips have been instrumental in powering the AI revolution, but the focus has predominantly been on software applications, such as the popular ChatGPT. However, the tech giant is now increasingly looking to integrate its AI capabilities into physical products, a shift that Huang has described as the “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.”
“Alpamayo represents a profound shift for Nvidia, moving from being primarily a compute to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, from Las Vegas. “Nvidia’s pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals.”
During the presentation, Nvidia showcased a video demonstration of the AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through the streets of San Francisco, with a passenger keeping their hands off the steering wheel. Huang emphasised that the vehicle’s natural driving performance is a result of it learning directly from human demonstrators, while also explaining its actions and reasoning in every scenario.
Alpamayo is an open-source AI model, with the underlying code now available on the machine learning platform Hugging Face, allowing autonomous vehicle researchers to access and retrain the model for free. Nvidia’s vision is that “someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous.”
This move by Nvidia could pose a challenge to companies like Tesla, which offers driver assistance software called Autopilot. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, responded to the Alpamayo announcement on social media, stating that while it’s “easy to get to 99%” in autonomous driving, the real challenge lies in “solving the long tail of the distribution.”
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, with a market cap of more than £3.3 trillion. The company has also revealed that its Rubin AI chips are currently being manufactured and are due for release later this year. These highly-anticipated hardware components are expected to compute using less energy than Nvidia’s current line of AI chips, potentially driving down the cost of developing autonomous driving technology.
As the race for dominance in the self-driving car market intensifies, Nvidia’s latest move with Alpamayo positions the company as a formidable player, poised to shape the future of transportation through its innovative AI-powered solutions.
