Developing Self-Driving Cars Is ‘Incredibly Daunting Challenge,’ Says Nvidia CEO

The work that Nvidia is doing in autonomous, “self-driving” vehicles “is really gaining traction” and has “captured the imagination of just about every car company around the world,” CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on a Wednesday earnings call. Nvidia believes the self-driving car “is not a solved problem,” Huang said. “I don't think anybody would dispute it. I also believe that self-driving cars is a field that's going to require the technological muscle of a very, very large industry and that no one company with a few hundred employees is going to solve it all by themselves. So the idea that an unsolved problem of such incredible, daunting levels that an entire computer industry is in the process of trying to solve could possibly be a closed system tied around a chip seems illogical to me.” Huang thinks the “soul” of any car company is composed of ingredients like the “driving experience,” the “functionality” and the “safety record” of its vehicles, he said. Those ingredients in the future will be “largely software-defined,” he said. But Huang “just can’t imagine great companies like BMW and Mercedes and Audi” outsourcing “the soul of their car to a chip company,” he said. “And so what we've decided to do is to create an automotive autonomous car computing platform and all of the rich software that's necessary to enable this incredibly high-throughput computer to behave in a really energy-efficient way and cost-effective way, and to be able to apply our deep learning expertise so that these cars can benefit from artificial intelligence to solve these really complicated world problems.” Nvidia thinks that “by partnering with every single car company in the world,” together “we might be able to solve this incredibly daunting challenge and hopefully bring some society good,” he said. Over the long haul, Huang thinks autonomous vehicle development will be “an area of quite a significant industrial revolution,” bringing with it “arguably quite a gigantic society good in the long term,” he said.