Chinese tech giants hope to have artificially intelligent, autonomous cars on the road in 5 years

Nvidia and Baidu team up to create open, cloud-based platform to self-driving vehicles

Published September 1, 2016 1:35PM (EDT)

Computer Vision and Deep Neural Network Pipeline (NVIDIA)
Computer Vision and Deep Neural Network Pipeline (NVIDIA)

On Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced a partnership with Chinese search engine Baidu to develop an open, cloud-based platform that would allow for the operation of artificially intelligent, self-driving cars.

"We’re going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," he said.

The open format will allow other car manufacturers to access the cloud and, perhaps, have their vehicles join the fleet of autonomous cars the companies expect to be able to offer ride-sharing services.

For its part, Baidu intends on using its in-house expertise in the fields of data mapping and artificial intelligence to mass-produce self-driving cars within five years.

It recently invested $75 million in Velodyne LiDAR, which produces technologies that make it possible for autonomous vehicles to "see" their environment, especially when combined with the regularly updated cloud-based map available to Nvidia's artificially intelligent Drive PX 2 software.


By Scott Eric Kaufman

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Ai Baidu Business Nvidia Self-driving Cars