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SNS: Asia Letter: Q3 2024 THAILAND JOINS THE BRICS By Scott Foster _____
"We Overtake Tesla" - Corporate mission of Turing, Turing originally planned to develop a Level 5 autonomous-driving system by 2030. But with competition on the rise, the company now aims to have a driverless vehicle running on the streets of Tokyo for more than 30 minutes by the end of this year. A vehicle operating at Level 5 is completely self-driving, able to go anywhere in all road conditions without a driver. Supported by Japanese venture capital funds and mobile telecom carriers NTT DOCOMO and KDDI, Turing is headquartered in Tokyo and has a factory in Kashiwa, to the northeast of the city. It was founded in 2021 by CEO Issei Yamamoto, the creator of an AI software program called "Ponanza" that plays shogi (Japanese chess) at a professional level. His CTO, Shunsuke Aoki, holds a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon. Working on the assumption that "what is necessary for autonomous driving is not good eyes, but a good brain," Yamamoto and Aoki are developing AI software that "directly issues driving instructions from camera images [. . .] without using many sensors or high-precision maps." This involves: 1) large sets of driving data to develop a system that transforms camera imagery directly into driving commands using neural networks; 2) "generative AI's common sense as a key to unlocking complete autonomous driving," because "[d]riving isn't just about the rules learned in driving school"; and 3) a GPU cluster powered by 96 Nvidia H100 units to make it possible. Honda, Toyota, and other Japanese automakers are also working on software-defined self-driving vehicles. Perhaps 2030 would be a more realistic target for them.
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