Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday on the firm’s GTC 2025 convention caught with custom and was chock stuffed with bulletins. But the corporate additionally snuck in just a little historical past lesson.
During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexInternet, a neural community structure that gained widespread consideration in 2012 when it received a pc picture recognition contest. Designed by laptop scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever (who’d go on to discovered OpenAI) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, AlexInternet achieved 84.7% accuracy in an educational competitors referred to as ImageNET.
The breakthrough end result led to a resurgence of curiosity in deep studying, a subset of machine studying that leverages neural networks.
Turns out, AlexInternet spurred Nvidia to go “all in” on autonomous autos, the best way Huang tells it.
“The second I noticed AlexInternet — and we’ve been engaged on laptop imaginative and prescient for a very long time — the second I noticed AlexInternet was such an inspiring second, such an thrilling second,” he stated on stage. “It brought on us to determine to go all in on constructing self-driving automobiles. So we’ve been engaged on self-driving automobiles now for over a decade. We construct expertise that nearly each single self-driving automotive firm makes use of.”
Nvidia has notched partnerships with quite a few automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech corporations growing autonomous autos. Its newest, an expanded collaboration with GM, was introduced this afternoon.
Automakers like Tesla and autonomous car builders Wayve and Waymo use Nvidia GPUs for knowledge facilities. Other corporations faucet Nvidia’s Omniverse product to construct “digital twins” of factories to nearly check manufacturing processes and design autos. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have used Nvidia’s Drive Orin laptop system-on-chip, which is relies on the chipmaker’s Nvidia Ampere supercomputing structure. Toyota and others are additionally using Nvidia’s safety-focused working system, DriveOS.
The upshot: Nvidia DNA is embedded within the automotive — and extra particularly, the automated driving — business.
