Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday on the corporate’s GTC 2025 convention caught with custom and was once chock-full of bulletins. However the corporate additionally snuck in a bit of historical past lesson.
All through the automobile portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural community structure that received fashionable consideration in 2012 when it gained a pc image-recognition contest. Designed through laptop scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever (who’d pass directly to discovered OpenAI) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet accomplished 84.7% accuracy in an educational festival referred to as ImageNET.
The leap forward end result resulted in a resurgence of passion in deep finding out, a subset of device finding out that leverages neural networks.
Seems, AlexNet spurred Nvidia to head “all in” on self sustaining automobiles, the best way Huang tells it.
“The instant I noticed AlexNet — and we’ve been running on laptop imaginative and prescient for a very long time — the instant I noticed AlexNet was once such an inspiring second, such an exhilarating second,” he stated onstage. “It brought about us to make a decision to head all in on development self-driving vehicles. So we’ve been running on self-driving vehicles now for over a decade. We construct generation that virtually each unmarried self-driving automobile corporate makes use of.”
Nvidia has notched partnerships with a lot of automakers, automobile providers, and tech corporations creating self sustaining automobiles. Its newest, an expanded collaboration with GM, was once introduced this afternoon.
Automakers like Tesla and self sustaining car builders Wayve and Waymo use Nvidia GPUs for knowledge facilities. Different corporations faucet Nvidia’s Omniverse product to construct “virtual twins” of factories to just about check manufacturing processes and design automobiles. In the meantime, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have used Nvidia’s Power Orin laptop system-on-chip, which is in accordance with the chipmaker’s Nvidia Ampere supercomputing structure. Toyota and others also are using Nvidia’s safety-focused running method, DriveOS.
The upshot: Nvidia DNA is embedded within the automobile — and extra in particular, the automatic riding — trade.
