Audi Building Artificial Intelligence-Powered Cars In Partnership With Nvidia

Audi is developing its own brand of self-driving cars with artificial intelligence in partnership with the graphics processing giant Nvidia. The Audi-Nvidia self-driving vehicle, described as the "world's most advanced autonomous car," is set for release in 2020.

Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spoke about the car at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Venture Beat reports. He said the vehicle that Nvidia is developing with Audi has the latest version of its car supercomputer chip named Xavier, which can perform complicated tasks such as being able to identify pedestrians.

At CES 2017, Audio presented the Q7, a car equipped with the Xavier supercomputer that can drive itself after just four training days. According to The Next Web, Xavier has 512 GPU cores and can deliver 20 trillion operations for every second of performance.

Audi also showed off its AI co-pilot software assistant that gives cars an awareness of what's taking place inside and outside of it using data from sensors. For instance, the co-pilot software can tell when a pedestrian is crossing the road and alert a human driver to it.

Nvidia's partnership with Audi goes back 10 years when Audi was able to more than triple sales to 210,000 cars a year. Audi's president for North America Scott Keogh said part of the reason was the addition of Nvidia technology to Audi cars.

Keogh said the partnership between Audi and Nvidia aims for safer roads. To pursue that goal, the partnership will be expanded to technologies that have to do with deep learning and artificial intelligence.

Audio joins a pretty long list of companies that are in the process of developing self-driving vehicles. Despite safety issues, many experts see driverless cars as the future of transportation.

BMW, Ford, Google, and Tesla are all planning to roll out their autonomous vehicles in a few years' time. Apple is also reportedly developing its own brand of driverless vehicles, while Uber, despite regulatory challenges in California, continues to test its self-driving cars in the US.