Generative AI, the technology behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, is significantly improving the industry from design to self-driving testing to infotainment to factory processes. Danny Shapiro, Vice President of Automotive at Nvidia, a technology company, declared that AI is now accessible to everyone. Different vendors, including Nvidia, are looking for ways to integrate AI into their products, including services such as Omniverse industrial metaverse platform and Drive, their development platform for autonomous vehicles.
Generative AI is a combination of algorithms which generate original, realistic content from “training data” such as images or text. ChatGPT is a type of chatbot which is fed with text or picture inputs, formulated as prompts, and offers text results. Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion are also kinds of AI tools that create pictures from natural language inputs. Nvidia founder, Jensen Huang, stated that this easy-to-use technology may be AI’s so-called “iPhone moment”.
The automotive industry is benefiting from generative AI by speeding up the designing and engineering of parts and even entire vehicles. AI is taught the laws of physics or thermodynamics to modify existing designs to be more efficient or aerodynamic. Car enthusiasts are using generative AI tools to design and create dream cars, too. However, experts add that the final tweaking of the generative models needs to be done by man and the quality of the output depends on the quality of the prompts. Online configurators are being improved by the use of such technology often used to visualize the car of one’s dreams.
Other uses include the development of efficient factories through the creation of “digital twins”. This technique is being used by companies who want to test out designs and processes and avoid errors before even the first step is taken. Generative AI is even making a step towards infotainment systems, helpful for natural voice commands, with Mercedes and GM all working on relevant projects.
Finally, autonomous vehicles are heavily relying on AI — it collects and processes data in order to create scenarios. Generative AI is a way to create more synthetic scenarios that can be used to train AI models and validate self-driving systems.
Nvidia is a leading chipmaker in the tech industry, established in 1993. They specialize in designing graphic processing units, system-on-chip units, and related multimedia software for professional and gaming sectors. Their products are used in evaluation, simulation and learning fields and the company is making successful progress in expanding its artificial intelligence solutions and autonomous vehicles services.
Danny Shapiro joined Nvidia in 2016 as Senior Director of Auto, with extensive knowledge and expertise in AI, connected car and driver assistance technologies. He was promoted to Vice President of Automotive in August 2019 to lead Nvidia’s work in autonomous driving. Previously, he held various positions in companies specialized in the automotive sector, such as Clima and Sirius XM. He also serves in various Boards and Committees and has significantly invested his time working in the US transportation sector.
