Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday on the firm’s GTC 2025 convention caught with custom and was chock filled with bulletins. However the firm additionally snuck in a bit of historical past lesson.
In the course of the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural community structure that gained widespread consideration in 2012 when it gained a pc picture recognition contest. Designed by laptop scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever (who’d go on to discovered OpenAI) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet achieved 84.7% accuracy in an educational competitors referred to as ImageNET.
The breakthrough outcome led to a resurgence of curiosity in deep studying, a subset of machine studying that leverages neural networks.
Seems, AlexNet spurred Nvidia to go “all in” on autonomous autos, the way in which Huang tells it.
“The second I noticed AlexNet — and we’ve been engaged on laptop imaginative and prescient for a very long time — the second I noticed AlexNet was such an inspiring second, such an thrilling second,” he mentioned on stage. “It brought on us to determine to go all in on constructing self-driving automobiles. So we’ve been engaged on self-driving automobiles now for over a decade. We construct know-how that just about each single self-driving automobile firm makes use of.”
Nvidia has notched partnerships with quite a few automakers, automotive suppliers, and tech firms growing autonomous autos. Its newest, an expanded collaboration with GM, was introduced this afternoon.
Automakers like Tesla and autonomous car builders Wayve and Waymo use Nvidia GPUs for knowledge facilities. Different firms faucet Nvidia’s Omniverse product to construct “digital twins” of factories to nearly check manufacturing processes and design autos. In the meantime, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have used Nvidia’s Drive Orin laptop system-on-chip, which is relies on the chipmaker’s Nvidia Ampere supercomputing structure. Toyota and others are additionally using Nvidia’s safety-focused working system, DriveOS.
The upshot: Nvidia DNA is embedded within the automotive — and extra particularly, the automated driving — trade.