Rivian is building its own powerful AI chips for autonomous driving

"Rivian announced that it was designing its own AI chips for fully autonomous driving, in a bold - if belated - move to catch up with Tesla and other automakers that have working on the technology for far longer. At an "AI and Autonomy" event at the company's office in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Rivian unveiled its own proprietary silicon chip, as well as a number of forthcoming autonomous features that it says will enable it to eventually sell Level 4 autonomous vehicles to customers. That includes equipping the company's upcoming R2 vehicles with lidar sensors."

"The company's chips, quoted at 1,600 trillion operations a second, will fuel a new push into self-driving cars for the EV company. Rivian also said it will launch a new AI-powered voice assistant as well as a foundational "Large Driving Model" trained similarly to large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT that will "distill superior driving strategies from massive datasets into the vehicle." And it said it would wrap everything up in an Autonomy Plus subscription service for a new potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company."

Rivian unveiled proprietary AI silicon and autonomous features aimed at achieving Level 4 self-driving capability. The company plans to equip upcoming R2 vehicles with lidar sensors. The new chips are quoted at 1,600 trillion operations per second and are intended to drive advanced autonomy functions. Rivian will introduce an AI-powered voice assistant and a foundational "Large Driving Model" trained like large language models to extract driving strategies from massive datasets. The autonomy stack will be offered through an "Autonomy Plus" subscription intended to create a recurring revenue stream. Sales pressure and financial losses are motivating the push.

Read at The Verge