Nvidia Making Its Move Into Tesla Territory

Nvidia has been working on self-driving cars for several years, but things seem to have escalated quickly. On Monday, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the tech platform Alpamayo, designed to "help self-driving cars think like humans" to navigate tricky situations on the road, as the BBC puts it.

• New cars: In what the New York Times calls a "surprisingly ambitious" schedule, Nvidia's system will be available in Mercedes-Benz CLA sedans later this year in the US and globally. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Huang said.
• The system: A post at eWeek notes that most self-driving cars typically "separate seeing from deciding," which works fine in 99% of scenarios, but the remaining 1% is where accidents happen. "Alpamayo does something different; it reasons about what it sees," writes Grant Harvey. "It can explain why it's making a decision, describe the scenario, and think through novel situations step-by-step, like how you'd talk through a tricky merge with a nervous passenger."

• Musk responds: After the Nvidia reveal, Elon Musk wrote that he's "not losing sleep about this," per Investors.com. He said the Nvidia system seems to be "exactly what Tesla is doing," adding, "What they will find is that it's easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution." Musk predicted it won't translate into "competitive pressure" on his company for at least five years, and perhaps longer. Of course, Musk once famously mocked the cars from China's BYD, which has since overtaken Tesla as the world's No. 1 EV seller.
• It's good already: At the Verge, Andrew J. Hawkins test-drove the Nvidia system in a Mercedes-Benz sedan and concludes that Musk should be worried. "Nvidia hasn't been working on this problem as long as Elon Musk's company, but what they showed me absolutely would go toe-to-toe with FSD under the most complex circumstances," he writes, referring to Tesla's Full Self-Driving mode.