Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz to launch an AI driven car this year

Heating up the race to get Artificial Intelligence onto the driver seat of our cars, Mercedes-Benz has teamed up with NVIDIA to bring an AI self-driving car on road within this year.

The announcement was made at the Mercedes-Benz inspiration talk at CES 2017, which saw Mercedes-Benz VP of Digital Vehicle and Mobility, Sajjad Khan and Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang, share the stage and talk about the collaboration.

The two executives said that the project they began together three years back will be completed soon that will put an AI driven car on the road within the year.

“At this point, it is very clear that AI is going to be the future of computing. This is an endeavour that we started three years ago that we will put on the road next year – unbelievable, said Jen-Hsun. “This breakthrough called deep learning happened several years ago, and it has completely revolutionised computing from the way you speak to your phone now to the way you take photos and upload to the cloud and how it automatically tags and hosts it for you,” he added.

Deep learning and AI have been the specific focus of Mercedes and Nvidia’s partnership. Nvidia announced additional AI features powered by its in-car computing at its keynote last week at CES. These include Co-Pilot, which is a system that combines facial recognition, gaze tracking and more to help assist human drivers as a way to increase safety ahead of the advent of true autonomous driving on the roads.

As of now, there is no clarity if the companies will be launching a more powerful version of the recently announced Co-Pilot, or if it will be an entirely new system but the duo is confident of getting it out within next 12 months.