Transportation industry banks on gen AI for autonomous solutions

As the equipment industry continues to develop autonomous solutions, the transportation industry sees gen AI as the key to on-road autonomous vehicles. 

Autonomy represents one of the world’s biggest challenges, Alex Kendall, co-founder and chief executive of London-based AI developer Wayve, said during a panel discussion at the Nvidia GTC show in San Jose, Calif., on March 19. 

Wayve communicates with the AI that informs its autonomous driving solution in plain language, so that both engineers and consumers can understand the vehicle’s logic as simply as they understand AI chatbots, Kendall said.   

“When you establish that connection, the benefits we’ve seen through chat interfaces now apply to driving models” he said. “From an engineering perspective, you can interrogate, look at counterfactuals and understand why the model has made a decision. From a consumer perspective, you can build trust with the system, understand what it’s going to do, and even customize its behavior.”

Needing generalization 

Generalization, or the ability for AI to perform in new and unfamiliar environments, remains a primary challenge for autonomous driving, one that can be an issue for vehicles traveling across entire continents, Raquel Urtasun, chief executive and founder of Toronto-based autonomous truck manufacturer Waabi said during the panel. 

“Oftentimes, in the industry, you have a lot of these [standardized] routes overfit into one location, and hopefully one day will expand from there, but you need to go fully away from that toward generalization” for the technology to be useful across a variety of geographies, she said. 

The main roadblock for generalization is the sheer amount of data necessary to help vehicles make decisions, Wayve’s Kendall said. This is when outside data can be used to save billions of dollars and the development of internal data. 

“To really scale,” he said, utilizing external data to train AI for vehicle autonomy is key. This allows for “an ability to scale the intelligence and data beyond what you can get from just a fleet.” 

Registration is now open for Equipment Finance Connect, the nation’s only dealer-centric equipment lending and leasing event, which will take place May 5-7 in Nashville, Tenn. Learn about the event and free dealer registration at EquipmentFinanceConnect.com.