Nvidia CEO Sees Level 5 ‘Robot Taxis’ in ‘Real Commercial Services’ by 2019

Nvidia’s autonomous-driving “road map” will include “development partnerships” it forges this year and next with a “growing number of car companies” on nonrecurring engineering and artificial intelligence projects, said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on a Thursday earnings call. Beginning in 2018, he said he expects to see “robot taxis start to come to the road.” Nvidia is working with a “handful” of really exciting robot taxi projects around the world, many that will begin beta-testing, “and then next year you'll see a lot more of them,” he said. Starting in 2019, “you'll see them go into real commercial services” as what the industry calls “Level 5s, basically, driverless cars” with full autonomy, he said. Huang expects fully autonomous “branded cars will start hitting the road around 2020 and 2021,” he said. Huang thinks cryptocurrency “is here to stay,” he said on the call. “The market need for it is going to grow, and over time it will become quite large,” said Huang. As new cryptocurrency “algorithms” are being developed, the graphics processing unit (GPU), such as the Tegra devices that Nvidia makes and markets, “is really quite ideal for it,” he said. “And so this is a market that is not likely to go away anytime soon, and the only thing that we can probably expect is that there will be more currencies to come. It will come in a whole lot of different nations. It will emerge from time to time, and the GPU is really quite great for it.” Nvidia’s cryptocurrency strategy “is to stay very, very close to the market,” said Huang. “We understand its dynamics really well.” Huang thinks “the larger of a GPU company you are,” the greater its ability to “absorb the volatility” of the business, he said. “Because we have such large volumes, we have the ability to rock and roll with this market as it goes.”