Nvidia releases open-source software for self-driving car development 

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Nvidia on Monday released new open-source software aimed at speeding up the development of self-driving cars using some of the newest “reasoning” techniques in artificial intelligence.

Nvidia has risen to become the world’s most valuable company as its chips have become central to the development of AI. But the company also maintains a broad software research arm that releases open-source AI code that others, such as Palantir Technologies, can adopt.

On Monday, Nvidia released Alpamayo-R1 for self-driving vehicles. The software is what is known as a “vision-language-action” AI model, which means that the self-driving vehicle translates what its sensor banks see on the road into a description using natural language.

The breakthrough with Alpamayo, which was named for a mountain peak in Peru that is particularly tricky to scale, is that it thinks aloud to itself as it plans its path through the world.

For example, if the car sees a bike path, it will note that it sees the path and is adjusting course.

Most previous self-driving car software was limited in how it explained why the car chose a particular path, making it hard for engineers to understand what needed to be fixed to make the cars safer.

“One of the entire motivations behind making this open is so that developers and researchers can… understand how these models work so we can, as an industry, come up with standard ways of evaluating how they work,” Katie Young, senior marketing manager for the automotive enterprise at Nvidia, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jan Harvey)