Self-Driving Cars Will Be ‘Incredible,’ But ‘We’re Not There Yet,’ Says nVidia CEO

There’s no single “answer” among semiconductor competitors on how to resolve the challenges of autonomous driving “because nobody knows exactly how to get it done,” nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on a Thursday earnings call. “We all have intuitions and we all have beliefs about how we're going to be able to ultimately solve the long-term, fully autonomous vehicle,” Huang said. When “the automobile we step into is completely autonomous, and it has AI inside and out,” it will be “just an incredible experience,” he said of artificial intelligence. “But we're not there yet.” Many semiconductor companies “have slightly different visions of the future” of self-driving cars, Huang said. Some believe “the path to the future is fully autonomous right away, in a geofenced area that has been fully mapped in advance,” he said. Others see “highway autopilot as a first starting point,” with development work progressing quickly toward full autonomy, he said. “So you see a lot of different visions out there, and I think all of those visions are coming from smart people doing smart things.” That said, nVidia is “absolutely certain that AI is going to be involved in this endeavor,” and that “we have the secret sauce necessary to break these puzzles,” Huang said. The company also believes “unquestionably, that depending on the problem you want to solve, you need a different amount of computational capability,” he said. “We believe unambiguously this is a software problem.” Autonomous driving’s challenges are “massive,” he said. “Otherwise, we would have done it already.” But “we're working with some really, really amazing people to get this done,” he said.