is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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Every six months or so, Nvidia’s head of automotive, Xinzhou Wu, invites CEO Jensen Huang to go for a ride in a vehicle equipped with the company’s hands-free autonomous driving system. But only when Wu has “good confidence” in the system’s driving capabilities.
Recently, the two went for a drive from Woodside, California, to downtown San Francisco in a Mercedes CLA sedan with MB.Drive Assist Pro, a hands-free driver-assist system partly designed by Nvidia that’s similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving. The mood was light, even if the traffic was pretty heavy.
“Let me know when you’re in autonomous mode,” Huang said to Wu, according to a video of the ride provided to The Verge, “then I can be less concerned about my safety.”
Over the course of the 22-minute video, the Mercedes navigates Huang and Wu through a series of everyday obstacles, like construction sites, double-parked cars, and lanes narrowly channeled through rows of orange cones. Nvidia’s system seems quite capable, though the video is edited and not presented in real time. (Nvidia spokesperson Jessica Soares later said there were no disengagements during the ride.)
Still, it seemed not dissimilar from my own experience last year riding shotgun with Nvidia executives in a Mercedes with the hands-free driving system activated. I was impressed by the system’s ability to handle traffic signals, four-way stops, double-parked cars, unprotected left turns, and all the pedestrians and cyclists and scooter-riders that San Francisco can throw at you. If Tesla can do it with a bit of silicon and a bunch of cameras, it stands to reason that the world’s most valuable company could figure it out too.
‘The ChatGPT moment for physical AI’
After years of operating behind the scenes, Nvidia is attempting to stake out a more prominent leadership position on autonomous driving. Not only is it supplying the chips to companies like Tesla, but it’s also offering its own AI-powered driving features to partners like Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lucid. At CES earlier this year, Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a portfolio of AI models, simulation blueprints, and datasets, that can give vehicles Level 4 autonomy, allowing them to fully drive themselves under specific conditions. Huang touted the announcement as “the ChatGPT moment for physical AI.”
In the car with Wu, Huang is less bombastic and more introspective — but no less bullish on the technology’s future. “I think the challenge, of course, is Alpamayo, as incredibly smart as it is — and it can reason about the circumstance — we don’t know what it can’t do,” he said. “And so that’s the challenge, and that’s the reason why our classical stack is so incredibly important.”
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