Autonomous Driving, Visual AI, and the Road Ahead with Porsche and Voxel51 - Ep. 267

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. It's often said that modern cars are computers rolling along on wheels. From performance and safety systems to in vehicle infotainment, computers control and oversee many, many functions in today's vehicles. Autonomous driving systems, of course, are no exception. The quest to build self driving cars depends on compute power and, yes, data, lots of data. Here to delve into the inner workings of autonomous vehicles and the increasingly vital role of data in modern car making, Our Tin Sohne, technical lead for vision language action models at Porsche, and Brian Moore, CEO and cofounder of Voxel fifty one, whose visual AI and computer vision data platform, 51, is used by customers across a range of industries, including, you guessed it, Portia. Tim, Brian, welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast, and thank you so much for taking the time to join. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. So maybe we can start with each of you introducing yourselves and just kind of talking a little bit about what you do at your respective companies and and a little bit about how that relates to autonomous systems. And, of course, we'll get into it. So, Tim, maybe you can start. Right. So I'm Tim. I'm a PhD student and tech lead at Porsche AG, like you said. I'm dealing with vision language action models for autonomous driving. And in my research, I want to turn cars into embodied agents that can understand space, time, and physical properties of the real world so that they are able to act within it and interact with the driver through natural language or through pose, facial expressions, or gesture. Fantastic. And, Brian, tell us a little bit about voxel fifty one. Yeah. So so as you mentioned, I'm Brian, the cofounder and CEO here at Voxel fifty one. First, my background. So I'm a geek, a nerd by background, and a PhD in machine learning from University of Michigan. CodeBlue? Exactly. That is where over ten years ago, I met my cofounder, Jason, who is a faculty at Michigan. We started off doing some consulting work, of course, being located in Ann Arbor, just down the road from Detroit, the Motor City. We had the opportunity and great pleasure to collaborate with a number of automakers, you know, ten plus years ago in early versions of autonomy, where we kind of reached that key insight that in theory, it's all about models and algorithms. In practice, it's all about data and data quality and data strategy, which led us to the opportunity and need, to provide our product 51 to help solve some of those data challenges. Very cool. And we'll get into as I said, as we talk, we'll get into a little bit more about what fifty one is and what voxel fifty one does with customers like Porsche. But maybe, Tim, let's start with you. On …