Nvidia Unveils Rubin and Announces New Open Source Autonomous Driving Model
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday announced a new autonomous driving model that aims to help cars reach Level 4 autonomous driving, in which a driver isn’t required to supervise the vehicle.
Separately, Huang also announced more detailed specifications for the company’s upcoming next-generation flagship AI chips, known as Rubin. The family of chips are designed to reduce the cost of generating AI tokens by as much as tenfold, when compared with its previous generation chips, the company said.
They also aim to cut the number of GPUs needed to train mixture-of-experts models by a factor of four. Those models use far less computing power by sending each query only to the most relevant parts of the model, rather than activating the entire model at once.
Speaking in a keynote presentation at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang said Nvidia’s new family of self-driving models called Alpamayo are the world’s first that can think and reason. “We imagine that someday a billion cars on a road will all be autonomous,” he said.
Nvidia is making its Alpamayo models open source, which allows outside developers to build their own self-driving cars based on its tech. That could ultimately drive sales of more Nvidia chips.
Huang said the first cars based on Nvidia’s self-driving tech would be made by Mercedes-Benz and be on the road by the first quarter of this year in the U.S. Those cars, however, will only offer Level 2 autonomous driving, which requires drivers to still supervise the vehicle.