August 29, 2024
Robotaxis will likely be common place in the future. Waymo already offers paid rides in San Francisco. Uber wants to be part of the future. To that goal, they have partnered with Wayve to make autonymous driving systems for production vehicles and put these vehicles into the Uber network. https://wayve.ai/press/wayve-and-uber-partner/ Uber will also make an investment as part of an extension to Wayve’s series C earlier this year. https://wayve.ai/press/series-c/ Softbank led that round that raised $1 billion. Nvidia and Microsoft also participated.
Wayve has created foundation models for autonomous driving similar to GPT for language. Their approach is similar to Tesla’s. Wayve does not use high definition maps. They are training a model to mimic human drivers and can handle any type of roads and unexpected obstacles. They leverage the fleet for learning. They will sell their models to OEM makers and fleet owners.
According to the series C blog post, Nvidia VP Rishi Dhall says Wayve will use Nvidia Blackwell chip and will use Nvidia DRIVE Orin and DRIVE Thor.