Automakers Making Deals to Speed Incorporation of AI

By AI Trends Staff
Automakers are making deals with technology companies to produce the next generation of cars that incorporate AI technology in new ways.
Nvidia last week reached an agreement with Mercedes-Benz to design a software-defined computing network for the car manufacturer’s entire fleet, with over-the-air updates and recurring revenue for applications, according to an account in Barron’s .
“This is the iPhone moment of the car industry,” stated Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who founded the company in 1993 to make a new chip to power three-dimensional video games. Gaming now represents $6.1 billion in revenue for Nvidia, which is now positioning for its next phase of growth, which will involve AI to a great extent. “People thought we were a videogame company,” stated Huang. “But we’re an accelerated computing company where videogames were our first killer app.”
The Data Center category, which exploits AI heavily, has been a winner for Nvidia, with revenue expected to more than double to $6.5 billion, making it the company’s biggest market.
Nvidia has established its CUDA parallel computing platform and application programming interface model used to develop applications to run on the company’s chips, as a market leader. Released in 2007, CUDA enables software developers and software engineers to use the graphics processing unit for general purpose processing, which is called GPGPU.
From its start producing hardware for videogames, to hardware and software to support AI, now to hardware, software and services for cars, Nvidia sees the opportunity as transformative.  “The first vertical market that we chose is autonomous vehicles because the scale is so great,” Huang stated. “And the life of the car is so long that if you offer new capabilities to each new owner, the economics could be quite wonderful.”
The software-centric computing architecture based on Nvidia’s Drive AGX Orin computer system-on-a-chip. The underlying architecture will be standard in Mercedes’ next generation of vehicles, starting sometime toward the end of 2024, stated Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz AG, during a live stream of the announcement, according to an account in TechCrunch.
Ola Källenius, chairman of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz AG The two companies plan to jointly develop the AI and automated vehicle applications that include Level 2 and Level 3 driver assistance functions, as well as automated parking functions up to Level 4.
“Many people talk about the modern car, the new car as a kind of smartphone on wheels. If you want to take that approach you really have to look at source software architecture from a holistic point of view,” stated Källenius. “One of the most important domains here is the driving assistant domain. That needs to dovetail into what we call software-driven architecture, to be able to...