Toyota Motor Corp is investing US$50 million with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the hopes of gaining an edge in an accelerating the race to phase out human drivers.
The financial commitment announced on Friday by the Japanese automaker is to be made over the next five years at joint research centers located in Silicon Valley and another technology hub in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Toyota has hired robotics expert Gill Pratt to oversee research aimed at developing artificial intelligence and other innovations that are to enable future car models to navigate roads without people doing all the steering and stopping.
“We believe this research will transform the future of mobility, improving safety and reducing traffic congestion,” said Kiyotaka Ise, a Toyota executive who oversees the company’s research and development group.
Unlike some of its rivals in the technology and auto industries, Toyota believes the day when cars are able to drive entirely by themselves is unlikely to arrive within the next decade.
The company is instead focusing its efforts on developing technologies that would turn a car into the equivalent of an intelligent assistant, which would recognize when it should take over the steering when a driver is distracted or play a favorite song when it detects a driver is in a bad mood.
“What if cars could become our trusted partners?” said Daniela Rus, an MIT professor who will lead the university’s research partnership with the automaker.
Toyota has been working on autonomous driving technology for about 20 years, but it was known as “advanced driving support” back in the 1990s, Ise said.
Pratt, a former program manager at the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, suspects many people will still want to drive some of the time even when cars are fully equipped to handle the task.
Pratt hopes Toyota’s research will give people the option of relying on computers to do the driving when they are stuck in traffic or traveling down a boring stretch of highway.
“Our focus today is more on the autonomy of people,” said Pratt, who is to be based in Silicon Valley.
Under the Toyota partnership, the MIT research center is to focus on inventing ways for cars to recognize their surroundings and make decisions that avert potential accidents.
If the goals are realized, Toyota might be able to build a car “that is never responsible for a collision,” Rus said.
Besides working on recognition technology, the Stanford research center is to try to create artificial intelligence programs that study human behavior to learn more about the decisionmaking and reasoning that goes into driving, so cars can quickly adjust to potentially dangerous situations on the road.
Stanford’s research is to be led by Li Fei-fei (李飛飛), director of the university’s artificial intelligence laboratory.
Not far away from Stanford, both General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co have established offices in Palo Alto, California, in their own quests to make smarter cars.
Meanwhile, just to the south, Google Inc’s self-driving cars are regularly cruising the roads of the company’s hometown of Mountain View, California, during ongoing testing of the vehicles.
California law still requires humans to be in the self-driving cars to take control in dangerous situations or if something goes wrong.
However, most of the time Google’s self-driving cars are being controlled by a computer. They logged a combined 236,000km in autonomous mode from June 3 through Monday, according to Google.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS