How AlexNet Shaped Nvidia's Focus on Autonomous Vehicles

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang delivered an exciting keynote on Tuesday at the GTC 2025 conference, following the company's tradition of significant announcements. Huang also took a moment to reflect on the company's roots and the history that shaped its current direction.

During the automotive section of his presentation, he highlighted AlexNet, a groundbreaking neural network architecture that gained prominence in 2012. AlexNet was the creation of computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky, along with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, who is well-known in the AI community. This model achieved an impressive 84.7% accuracy at the ImageNET competition, a challenge focused on computer image recognition.

This remarkable success of AlexNet ignited a renewed interest in deep learning, which is a critical part of machine learning that employs neural networks to analyze data.

According to Huang, the unveiling of AlexNet was a pivotal moment for Nvidia, encouraging the company to fully commit to developing autonomous vehicle technology. He expressed, "The moment I saw AlexNet... it was such an inspiring and exciting moment. It prompted us to decide to go all in on building self-driving cars. We've been working on self-driving technology for over a decade now, creating solutions that are utilized by almost every self-driving car company out there."

Nvidia has forged partnerships with a wide variety of automakers, automotive suppliers, and technology companies involved in crafting autonomous vehicles. A significant announcement was made regarding an expanded collaboration with GM during the conference.

Major car manufacturers such as Tesla and autonomous vehicle innovators including Wayve and Waymo rely on Nvidia's GPUs for their data centers. Additionally, several companies use Nvidia’s Omniverse software to create digital replicas of factories, allowing them to virtually test production processes and design new vehicles. Top automakers like Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, and Zoox have adopted Nvidia’s Drive Orin computer system, which is built on Nvidia's advanced Ampere supercomputing architecture. Furthermore, companies like Toyota use Nvidia’s safety-focused operating system, DriveOS.

In summary, Nvidia's technologies play a significant role in the automotive sector, particularly in the field of automated driving.

Nvidia, AI, Autonomous, Vehicles, Technology