An AI model from over a decade ago sparked Nvidia’s investment in autonomous vehicles
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote Tuesday on the GTC 2025 conference of the company remained with tradition and was full of announcements. But the company also demolished into a small history lesson.
During the car part of his speech, Huang referred to Alexnet, a neural network architecture that received widespread attention in 2012 when it won a computer statement match. Designed by computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutkever (who continued with OpenAI) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, Alexnet achieved 84.7% accuracy in an academic competition called Imagenet.
The breakthrough result led to a revival of interest in deep learning, a subset of machine learning that uses neural networks.
It turns out that Alexnet Nvidia encouraged to “go into everything” on autonomous vehicles, as Huang tells.
“The moment I saw Alexnet – and we have been working on Computer Vision for a long time – the moment I saw Alexnet was such an inspiring moment, such an exciting moment,” he said on stage. “It made us decide to build self -driving cars. So we have been working for more than a decade of self -driving cars.”
NVIDIA has achieved partnerships with numerous car manufacturers, car suppliers and technology companies that develop autonomous vehicles. The last, an extensive collaboration with GM, was announced this afternoon.
Automakers such as Tesla and autonomous vehicle developers Wayve and Waymo use NVIDIA GPUs for data centers. Other companies tap Nvidia’s omnian product to build ‘digital twins’ from factories to virtually test production processes and design vehicles. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota and ZOX Nvidia’s Drive Orin-computer system-on-chip have used, which is based on the Nvidia-Ampère-Supercomput architecture of the chip maker. Toyota and others also use the safety -oriented operating system of Nvidia, Driveos.
The result: Nvidia DNA is embedded in the car – and more specifically, the automated row industry.
