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The steering wheel on an Inceptio Technology autonomous truck in Jinan, Shandong province, China, on Thursday, April 18, 2024.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | getty images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
BEIJING \u2014 While AI updates make headlines every few weeks, those advances aren’t enough to get self-driving vehicles on the road more quickly. <\/p>\n
That’s according to Chinese autonomous trucking companies, who say improvements in big language models, from Anthropic’s Cloud to China’s DeepSeq, have little impact on vehicle deployment timelines. <\/p>\n
“Having the world’s best linguistics[expert]doesn’t mean he’s a good driver,” Pony.ai CEO James Peng told reporters last week. “AI is a very broad term. They’re completely different things. Absolutely… zero relevance.” <\/p>\n
“When we work on language, when we play sports, when we drive, we all use different skills,” he said.<\/p>\n
Autonomous driving uses artificial intelligence to mimic a human driver with a combination of sensors, chips, and algorithms. But the real-world training data needed is very different from what powers large language models, called world models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
CEO Julian Ma told CNBC that Inceptio, a self-driving truck startup, is still sticking to its timeline for a mid-2028 commercialization milestone, unaffected by broader advances in AI.<\/p>\n
They expect Inceptio to have collected 5 billion kilometers (3.1 billion miles) of truck driving data in China by the third or fourth quarter of 2028 \u2013 enough to allow fully autonomous heavy-duty trucks to operate on public roads. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
With 5 billion kilometers of collected driving data, AI can turn it into a world model with 50 billion kilometers of experience \u2013 which is then enough to allow a heavy-duty truck to drive completely on its own, Ma said. He hopes that in some parts of the country, trucks can start operating without any humans.<\/p>\n
Achieving that goal in about two years is already fast enough, he said, adding that for driverless trucks to become a widespread reality, they will need partnerships with manufacturers and regulatory approval in addition to the technology.<\/p>\n
Autonomous vehicles rely heavily on data about driving on the roads. Like robotaxi companies, self-driving truck operators run manned tests to safely gather training data. <\/p>\n
According to ARK Invest, Incepio has recorded the most commercial autonomous truck miles in the industry to date, exceeding US rivals. big ideas 2026 report<\/a> In January. At that time, the company had driven 250 million miles \u2013 much more than fellow Chinese autonomous driving company pony.ai