Kai Yu’s roadmap to hands-off and mind-off driving

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 14:25

   Talking about sleeping well and the autonomous journey. So you split between hands off, eyes off, mind off. These are kind of the three steps that a car will go through. And in January last year, you put dates on them. So we'll have ISOF in three years. I'm sorry, hands-off in three years. We'll have ISOF in five, mind-off in 10. Just where are we today? Well, we are in very good progress, I think.

2. 14:58

   You know what? In the industry, there are sort of like standard from like level two, level three, level four, level five. It's really from the engineering standpoint for the consumers. You know, they have no clue what is level three. You know, so I always try to connect our technology and the product to something where my mom, at least, she can understand. So then that's my way to interpret the technology stages from, you know, hands-free, hands-off, eyes-off, and minds-off.

3. 15:29

   So what did you tell your mom just now? Right now, we are in a very good progress to achieve fully hands-off. Yeah, I think then I said that I made that statement last year, right? So that means by the end of 2028, we're going to achieve fully hands-off. And then by the end of 2030, to achieve fully eyes-off. And then by the end of 2035, going to be... of 100% minds off, basically, you can sleep in your car, in a running car.

4. 16:06

   And I think we are in very good progress. And if you look at our product, our latest product, namely the software stack called Horizon SuperDrive, running on our Journey 6T SoC, currently, essentially, you can feel completely hands-free. it's just like a new version a smarter version of automatic transmission if you remember over the last 20 years so the whole industry, the car industry evolved from the manual transmission and you need to control all the gears and later getting into the automatic transmission but now I call this getting into the smarter version of automatic transmission.

5. 17:00

   Basically, you just need to stay watching ahead and nothing else you need to take care of. What is still lacking? What part of the technology are you still... What's the critical element which is still left here? Well, I think we need a much bigger knowledge to test and we need to have better numbers for statistics and then to prove that the technology is safe enough to claim, you know, ISOF, right?

6. 17:35

   So I think already we are in the very progress to approach the stage of hands-off, but I think we need a much bigger, you know, knowledge to test and prove ISOF. Do you build your own AI models? Sure, sure. The self-driving model, yeah. Yeah. You remember, we position ourselves as a Vintel, right? Not just the Intel. We position ourselves as a Vintel. And I think Vintel is the really, I think it's an amazing business model.

7. 18:12

   And where is the kind of the future breakthrough going to come? Is it the model, the data, the chips? Well, it's a combination of three factors together, I think. This is a typical formula of today's AI business. I think you need to have a much bigger compute running locally on the vehicle. And also, you need to continuously collect bigger and bigger data, but also meaningful data. It's not just the quantity, but also quality.

8. 18:50

   That means you need to collect many, many of the meaningful coroner cases. And I think also you need bigger and bigger models in terms of a number of parameters.