NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote on Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was full of announcements. But the company also fell into a small history lesson.
During his speech car department, Huang referred to Alexnet, an architecture of neuronal networks that widely caught attention in 2012, when he won a computer image recognition contest. Designed by Computer Scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever (who would continue to find Openai) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, Alexnet achieved 84.7% accuracy in an academic competition called Imagenet.
The result of the revolution has led to a resurgence of interest in deep learning, a subset of mechanical learning that utilizes neural networks.
It turns out that Alexnet prompted Nvidia to go “everything” to autonomous vehicles, as Huang says.
“The moment I saw Alexnet – and we are working on the vision of the computer for a long time – the moment I saw Alexnet was such an inspirational moment, such a fascinating moment,” he told the stage. “It challenged us to decide to all go to self-guiding cars, so we are now working on self-driving for over a decade.
NVIDIA has a notibrated partnerships with numerous automakers, car suppliers and technology companies that are developing autonomous vehicles. His latter, an extensive collaboration with GM, was announced this afternoon.
Automotives such as Tesla and autonomous Wayve and Waymo vehicle developers use NVIDIA GPU for data centers. Other companies are playing the product of Nvidia Omniverse for the manufacture of “digital twin” factories to essentially test production processes and design vehicles. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota and Zoox have used Nvidia’s Drive Orin Computer System-On-Chip, which is based on Nvidia’s Nvidia supercomputing architecture. Toyota and others also use the NVIDIA security operating system, Driveos.
UPSHOT: Nvidia DNA is integrated into the automotive industry – and more specifically, the automated driving industry.
