@Scobleizer
I thought I knew everything about autonomous vehicles, but, nope. I almost got in an argument with cofounder @dfergusonnz of @nuro about LiDAR at NVIDIA GTC during his session. He laid out that LiDAR shows safety improvements. But then said that LiDAR can see a kid all in black at night lying on the road around a turn. My answer? Matrix headlights see all that. Truth be told, his session at GTC was awesome and Nuro has amazing tech that can generalize to any vehicle. He showed it off driving in Japan for the first time driving on a left hand road it had never seen before. But seriously, been doing a ton of work today to understand the autonomous vehicle industry. Talked with NVIDIA's team, met people from General Motors, Uber, and others, attended a class by Nuro's founder, and on Friday NVIDIA is taking me for a ride. The thing that stunned me was NVIDIA's simulator. You give it a picture of a road and a prompt and it creates a simulated road for you. Then you can make it snow, rain, or any number of situations. Put pedestrians on. And all created with a fairly small model. Now I understand why NVIDIA is in love with simulators. I asked Jensen at his press conference about it. And what it means for glasses coming soon. And he was bullish on the future of glasses to show both ground truth (reality) and whatever you want the simulator to show you (the Holodeck). GTC 2030 is gonna be insane. :-) Videos will come someday. I have a ton of them and no time to edit or upload. Packed the week with too many meetings. Be back over the weekend. Or I might steal one of those simulators. The whole thing was running on a box under the demo station. You think @AlexFinn has cool inferencing computers under his desk? A Mac can't simulate any road, with any condition, and his Mac doesn't have a steering wheel. New goals. :-) Oh, and the conclusion (yes I'm burying the lede, as we say in journalism circles): Pretty much car company will have self driving cars within 18 months. Which is awesome. Fewer lives lost. The real question is who can do Robotaxi. Nuro is only planning on a few tens of thousands of vehicles. That's not nearly aggressive enough for me. Guy who works for GM was sitting next to me and he said "the companies can't figure out the liability and regulation issues yet to really scale up." Back to the argument, he said LiDARs cost in "low thousands" now. In the car industry that's a huge amount, as one analyst that I didn't catch name of, pointed out in the audience. Everyone I'm talking to says Tesla drives smoother than the others. Will see on Friday when I get my ride in NVIDIA's. My money is still on Tesla. They have all the pieces to do Robotaxi at scale and become the "Starbucks" of Robotaxis. But this market is just starting, so the next 18 months are gonna be highly entertaining. More arguments ahead. So honored to be reporting for CNQQ. Chinese Tech ETF. Investors in China are highly interested in autonomous vehicles. https://t.co/2BjIVhqvR4