Nvidia opened CES 2024 in Las Vegas this week with one of its typical news-packed wide-ranging keynote presentations. Much of the focus was on the merger of gaming and generative AI, including the unveiling of the GeForce RTX 40 SUPER GPUs with increased gaming and generative AI performance.
However, Nvidia also found time to update the world with its latest AI moves in the automotive and robotics markets. For starters, Nvidia said its Omniverse software platform is being adopted by companies enabling auto configurator tools that are becoming increasingly important to the car buying process as customers want to visualize color changes and customize features before they buy, something that is difficult to do only with pre-rendered images of vehicles. Nvidia said creative partners and developers like BITONE, Brickland, Configit, Katana Studio Ltd. (serving Craft Detroit), WPP and ZeroLight are pioneering Omniverse-powered configurators, while automakers such as Lotus are adopting these advanced solutions.
The company announced that Chinese electric vehicle maker Li Auto has selected the Nvidia DRIVE Thor centralized car computer to power its next-generation fleets. Also, fellow Chinese EV makers GWM (Great Wall Motor), ZEEKR, and Xiaomi have adopted the DRIVE Orin platform to power their intelligent automated-driving systems.
Also, while Burlington Massachusetts-based Cerence became a trending name this week with the news that Volkswagen would be the first automaker to deploy its Cerence Chat Pro for integrating ChatGPT into in-car assistants, Nvidia also said its DRIVE system will serve as the in-car computing platform for Cerence’s new CaLLM automotive-specific large language model.
Nvidia also announced at CES numerous other relationships and demonstrations with other EV and automakers around the world.
Meanwhile, during Nvidia’s CES special address, Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing Deepu Talla shared how the infusion of generative AI into robotics is speeding up the ability to bring robots from proof of concept to real-world deployment.
“Applying generative AI to robotics will be transformative to accelerating the development and deployment of smarter robots, Tallas said, explaining tha robotics companies can leverage the “dual computer model” of Nvidia’s Isaac platform, which includes and AI factory component of AI and large language models, along with the second computer in the model, the runtime of the robot that is continuously learning new capabilities.