"Transformers" is getting closer and closer?
Recently, the "Transformers 7" movie is in theaters, and at the same time, a number of latest news are summarized, pointing to the "car intelligent life" of "Transformers" getting closer and closer to us.
On the 16th, an exclusive interview report by the British "Daily Mail" said that Harvard University scholar Loeb speculated that extraterrestrial civilizations may first contact artificial intelligence rather than humans. Loeb pointed out in the interview that extraterrestrial civilizations will think that human beings are more "low-end", and communication will fall into the point of "playing the piano to cows", so extraterrestrial civilizations will give priority to communicating with our AI.
Coincidentally, on June 16, a number of car companies announced at the same time that they would next integrate ChatGPT-like generative AI into their own models. On the same day, German automakers Mercedes-Benz and Microsoft announced at the same time that they will cooperate to integrate ChatGPT artificial intelligence services into existing cars, benefiting 900,000 vehicles in the United States; Another car company, Tesla, also announced its embrace of AI on the same day, and although Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been outspoken about the dangers of artificial intelligence, he also hinted that Tesla may incorporate AI into its business.
Although Musk has always hated generative AI and thinks that this thing is unreliable, Musk quietly founded a new artificial intelligence startup called X.ai in Nevada in April and May this year, which plans to launch a ChatGPT-like generative AI as soon as possible and named TruthGPT. Some insiders pointed out that TruthGPT is the generative AI that Tesla will access.
Are smart cars the next outlet after new energy vehicles? Has the era of smart cars quietly arrived?
What is a smart car?
Intelligent car is not simply to achieve the function of automatic driving on the car, intelligent vehicle is a collection of environmental perception, planning decision-making, multi-level assisted driving and other functions in one of the integrated system, it concentrates the use of computer, modern sensing, information fusion, communication, artificial intelligence and automatic control and other technologies, is a typical high-tech complex.
According to the vision, smart cars are the same as the current ChatGPT to bring to technology, allowing cars and humans to communicate without barriers, think independently, and complete a series of tasks independently.
I believe that most of the post-80s memories remember such an American drama, its name is "Thunderbolt Ranger", in the play there is a Pontiac Firebird car that integrates a large number of technological crystallizations, its name is "guitar", the guitar has all the characteristics of the smart car that people imagined at that time, can talk to the protagonist Mike, can drive autonomously, can think independently, and even can play exquisite cooperation with Mike in the task, call and linger.
The guitar became the "dream car" of all post-80s teenagers at that time, but the guitar only stayed in the beautiful imagination of science fiction American dramas, and its cost was extremely high, and it was necessary to return to the base after each mission to be maintained by a special scientific research team. As "precious" as stealth fighters.
Now, the automotive industry has been connected to ChatGPT, it is very likely that in a short period of time, the launch of the same function as the "guitar" of the car, in addition to the performance of bulletproof, I believe that soon we may all have a "guitar", so think is it too cool?
In fact, behind this is that the process of AI commercialization is accelerating, and domestic and foreign companies and research institutes continue to iterate at the level of AI model algorithms, application scenarios, and product forms. On the application side, AI+ has begun to be widely used in the automotive industry, which is almost an inevitable result.
The cooperation between Mercedes-Benz and Microsoft is the first application case of ChatGPT in the automotive industry. Mercedes-Benz pointed out that many voice assistants on the market can only perform pre-set tasks or answers, but behind ChatGPT is a generative large language model, which can greatly improve the understanding of natural language communication of car owners and enrich various topics of communication with car owners.
Access to generative AI is more critical for Tesla, some Wall Street analysts pointed out that Tesla's only means to attract consumers has become a price cut, which is fatal to Tesla with technology as a selling point, it urgently needs a new breakthrough, making the car smarter is a very good breakthrough.
In fact, for domestic new energy vehicle owners, the use of on-board systems for voice human-computer interaction is nothing new at all, each domestic car company has its own set of interaction rules, such as BYD's models You can use "Hello Xiaodi!" "Come to call out the car interaction; The ideal car can wake up the system with the "ideal classmate"; NIO can wake up the system in two ways: voice call and gesture call...
As long as the owner who has used these systems will definitely find that although these computer-computer interaction methods are much more advanced than the previous push-button traditional cars, but they have more or less some problems, such as being complained by new energy vehicle owners, the on-board voice assistant is not sensitive, sometimes the voice call with a non-standard voice does not respond, the understanding is wrong after giving instructions, can only understand a single instruction, the language of a complex system can not be understood, and even sometimes the owner is chatting with others, The voice assistant misunderstood the instructions and turned off the air conditioner... At this time, let alone expect to talk to it, it is fortunate to be able to accurately execute every instruction.
Some insiders predict that if car companies access generative AI in large numbers in the future, they will be able to experience a more intelligent voice assistant, which can not only accept natural language instructions, but also conduct complex conversations with car owners. For example, it can tell the owner what to pay attention to during this trip, destination information and suggest where to eat at the destination, in short, the owner will get a more humane answer, and your hands do not need to leave the steering wheel throughout the process.
AI has entered the domestic automotive market
Compared with Mercedes-Benz and Microsoft joining hands to enter smart cars, in fact, domestic smart cars landed earlier.
According to media reports, in recent years, the scale of the global smart car market has shown explosive growth, and China's smart car industry has ushered in a period of rapid development. According to data from the China Research Institute of Industry, the market size of smart cars is about 1 trillion yuan.
According to data from the Passenger Association of China, 5.233 million new energy passenger vehicles were sold in 2022, of which 2.404 million were smart cars, accounting for 45.94%. According to incomplete statistics, from January to February 2023, a total of 10 new energy vehicles equipped with L2 intelligent driving functions were launched/newly added, all of which were equipped with Internet of Vehicles and OTA functions as standard, and domestic brands such as BYD, Changan, Lantu, and Qianjie have been at the forefront of the smart automotive industry.
Moreover, the national policy level also attaches great importance to the development of smart vehicles. On May 5, the First Department of Equipment Industry of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organized the National Automotive Standardization Technical Committee to carry out the formulation and revision of four mandatory national standards, including "Vehicle Information Security Technical Requirements" and "Intelligent Networked Vehicle Autonomous Driving Data Recording System", which played a role in promoting the construction of intelligent transportation systems and helping intelligent upgrading of automobiles.
According to incomplete statistics, by the end of 2022, the national level (the State Council and its direct agencies) and 18 provincial-level (including municipalities directly under the central government, the same below) units have issued a total of 79 (smart car) autonomous driving industry-related policies, of which 46 policies (smart car) autonomous driving industry issued by the State Council and its directly subordinate agencies, and 33 issued by 18 provincial-level administrative units.
In the domestic automotive industry, Huawei has been regarded as a pioneer of smart cars. Although Huawei has not personally built cars, Huawei has been providing full-stack smart car solutions for the domestic automotive industry.
A review of the timetable will show that Huawei began to continuously invest in automotive intelligence and networking technologies as early as 10 years ago, with an annual R&D investment of more than 10 billion yuan, not including indirect R&D investment, and as many as 7,000 direct R&D personnel, ensuring generational leadership in the field of automotive intelligent core technologies, and applying accumulated ICT technology to vehicles.
In Huawei's "automotive ecosystem" strategy, intelligent networked vehicles are a key area. Huawei established the Automotive Solutions Department in 2016 and began to explore and deploy in the automotive field. Since then, Huawei has successively launched a series of automotive electronic products and solutions, in addition to not making batteries, Huawei has involved the "three electric" solutions, focusing on the "four intelligences": intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, intelligent networking, and intelligent vehicle control, building a comprehensive smart vehicle ecosystem.
In 2021, Huawei and Cialis jointly released AITO, a high-end smart car brand, at Chongqing Liangjiang Smart Factory, which is the main intelligent car series under the AITO brand. On April 17, 2023, AITO Advanced Intelligent Driving Edition (M5 Intelligent Driving Version) was also officially launched.
Another technology company, SenseTime, which seems to be unrelated to smart cars, suddenly appeared in the "peerless" of intelligent cabins at the recent Shanghai Auto Show. Equipped with the Chinese language model "SenseChat" and the AI content creation community platform "SenseMirage", the SenseTime Future Capsule attracted many attendees to watch.
SenseTime's "SenseNova" large model system has brought many breakthroughs to SenseTime's own business. Taking the field of intelligent driving as an example, based on the visual large model, SenseTime has already realized the mass production of BEV surround view general perception algorithm that can recognize 3,000 types of objects, and has also built a multi-modal model of autonomous driving that integrates perception and decision-making, obtaining stronger environment, behavior, and motivation decoding capabilities.
Compared with overseas car companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Tesla that are now entering smart cars, it is obvious that domestic technology companies and car companies are aiming at smart cars earlier, not only one step ahead, but also one step ahead. It can be said that not only the future of new energy vehicles belongs to Made in China, but even the future of smart vehicles also belongs to China's intelligent manufacturing.
As Huawei's Yu Chengdong said: "The era of smart cars is actually the era of intelligent terminals with wheels. ”
Wen 丨BTmt Technology Aoyama Egret