Nvidia on Monday released new open source software aimed at accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles using some of the latest “reasoning” techniques in artificial intelligence.
Nvidia has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to the fact that its chips are essential for the development of AI. But the company also maintains a research arm that releases open source AI software that others, such as Palantir Technologies, can adopt.
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On Monday, Nvidia launched Alpamayo-R1 for self-driving vehicles. The software is what is known as a “vision-language-action” AI model, which means that the autonomous vehicle translates what its sensor banks see on the road into a description using natural language. The big advance of the Alpamayo, which owes its name to a mountain in Peru that is especially difficult to climb, is that it thinks out loud to itself as it plans its route around the world.
For example, if the car sees a bike lane, it will indicate that it sees it and is adjusting course.
Most previous autonomous driving programs had limitations in explaining why the vehicle chose a certain path, making it difficult for engineers to understand what needed to be fixed to make them safer.
“One of the main motivations for making this open is so that developers and researchers can … understand how these models work so that we can, as an industry, come up with standard ways of evaluating how they work,” Katie Young, director of marketing for Nvidia’s automotive business, told Reuters.
With information from Reuters
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