Home » What is so great about the new startup Waabi that it attracts support from NVIDIA, Volvo and other big names?

What is so great about the new startup Waabi that it attracts support from NVIDIA, Volvo and other big names?

by Jessica Lam
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In recent years, self-driving technology is setting off an unprecedented wave of innovation. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, the self-driving car industry has ushered in new breakthroughs and subverted the traditional development model, attracting the attention of top investors from around the world.

Waabi Innovation, a Toronto-based self-driving truck startup, recently successfully raised $200 million in funding, attracting investment from Uber, NVIDIA, and Volvo Group’s venture capital arm. With this financing, Waabi will expand its commercial operations and expand its team in Canada and the United States to achieve the commercial deployment plan of driverless trucks in 2025.

The biggest difference between Waabi and Tesla─Introducing digital twins and generative AI

Unlike other self-driving technology companies such as Tesla and Waymo, Waabi takes a completely different approach to training its AI systems.

Tesla’s self-driving technology relies on “imitation learning”, which requires collecting and analyzing a large number of real driving videos to train the AI ​​model, but this process often takes a lot of time and resources .

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In contrast, Waabi uses a closed simulator called Waabi World for training, testing, and validation. This simulator can automatically build real-world digital twins from data to perform real-time sensor simulations, and create various scenarios to stress test the Waabi Driver so that it can learn from its mistakes. No manual intervention is required. (Editor’s note: Waabi uses LiDAR technology)

Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, said that if a system with true human reasoning capabilities could be built, the amount of data and calculations required would be greatly reduced. Waabi’s system can perform more efficient inference with less data and computing resources, without the need to deploy a large number of vehicles around the world .

Waabi’s generative AI method gives its AI system “human-like reasoning” capabilities and can still respond correctly to unseen situations. This not only reduces costs, but also allows the system to develop more flexibly and quickly to cope with various never-before-encountered driving scenarios.

The self-driving market was once in a downturn, and generative AI drove a new trend

In addition to Waabi, several other self-driving technology startups have also received considerable financing this year. For example, UK-based Wayve recently completed a $1.05 billion Series C round led by SoftBank Group. Applied Intuition also raised US$250 million in funding in March this year, with a valuation of US$6 billion, and is committed to applying AI to fields such as automobiles, defense, construction and agriculture.

The common reason why these companies were able to raise large amounts of funds during the market downturn is that they have adopted a new generation of generative AI technology . These technologies no longer rely on huge data sets and computing resources, but can be used more efficiently. way to reason and learn.

Of course, Waabi’s long-term goals extend far beyond self-driving trucks. Urtasun said the technology has broad application potential, not only for self-driving trucks but also for autonomous taxis, humanoid robots and industrial robots . “This technology is very powerful and can be used in various scenarios. It can solve more automation needs in the future.”

Another important feature of Waabi’s generative AI model is that it does not fall into the “black box” or “hallucination” effect , which is very common in current language generation AI models. This is because Waabi’s model is an interpretable, end-to-end trainable system whose decision-making process can be traced and verified, which is critical to ensuring security.

Waabi leads the new trend in self-driving technology with its unique technology and innovative approach. Compared with competitors such as Tesla, Waabi’s generative AI methods and digital simulation technology not only improve efficiency but also greatly reduce costs, making it stand out in the fierce market competition. As more self-driving technology startups continue to receive financial support, the development prospects in this field will become even brighter.

Top image source: Waabi

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