Nvidia creates artificial intelligence that trains cars

At CES 2025, Nvidia presented Cosmos, a platform with which virtual scenarios can be created to train autonomous driving systems

Photo by: nvidia

By: Massimo Grassi

Jan 10, 2025 at 5:05am ET

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For years now, Nvidia, the global IT giant, has had its eye on the automotive world, presenting technologies for infotainment systems and beyond from year to year, focusing mainly on artificial intelligence. A further step in this area was taken at CES 2025, the trade fair that brings together the best in technology every year in Las Vegas, with the presentation of Nvidia Cosmos.

This is a platform capable of generating videos of virtual environments, integrating different variables such as road surface types, weather conditions and more, all to help developers create self-driving vehicles.

From text to video

The basic operation is what we have learnt to use with various chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini: enter text to get answers or images. The highlight of Nvidia Cosmos lies in what is created and for what purpose.

The platform in fact generates realistic videos to help artificial intelligence better understand the physical world. A sort of virtual encyclopaedia for AI, instructed by the inclusion of over 20 million hours of footage of (to quote Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO) "humans walking, hands moving, manipulating things". Simulations that accurately show the space between objects and their physical interactions.

It is a system through which developers from all over the world will be able to create customised models, inserting prompts (i.e. the instructions given to the AI to describe to them what you want to achieve) by also entering data such as videos and photos. In this way, it will be possible to train the various assisted and autonomous driving systems in a more economical and safer way, taking already extensively computer-tested (and trained) forklifts on the road. To better understand what this is all about, you can go directly to the Nvidia Cosmos portal and create your own video.

Video showing how Nvidia Cosmos works

Billions

"A revolution that will lead to the first multi-billion dollar industry in robotics," said Huang. Cosmos could in fact give a new boost to the world of autonomous driving, which in between ups and downs continues to hold sway among car manufacturers, thanks in part to NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, a hardware and software platform developed by the Californian company based on the NVIDIA DriveOS operating system.

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As announced at CES 2025, this technology will be used by Toyota for its upcoming vehicles, while Aurora (a company specialising in autonomous driving) and Continental have announced a long-term strategic partnership with Nvidia to implement driverless truck systems. "The delivery of one driverless truck will be something monumental. Deploying thousands of them will change the way we live," said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora.

The three companies join an already large group consisting of BYD, Jaguar Land Rover, Li Auto, Lucid, Mercedes-Benz, NIO, Nuro, Rivian, Volvo Cars, Waabi, Wayve, Xiaomi, ZEEKR and Zoox, among others.