“The biggest challenge for us is to implement self-driving cars that meet the safe environment”, said Cha Jeonghun. Cha, the executive vice president of the Nvidia explained the difficulty of commercializing self-driving cars at SK Telecom’s True Innovation Meet-up event held on 17th of April.
During the event, Cha gave a keynote about AI and autonomous driving. “Safety environment means to predict future problems and create problem-solving solutions and executing them. Then, constantly repeat, verify, and record the process of a problem solution to find out whether the problems have been solved”, said Cha. Also, he added this process takes a lot of time and effort for companies.
He also explained AI as the ‘high-tech rough work’, saying “Nvidia has been putting a lot of effort and time to optimize the service in a safe environment”. To put in a nutshell, Nvidia is virtually simulating driving scenarios through the Nvidia drive platform and repeating safety verification.
Cha said, “it is important for startups to launch the service as soon as possible, but the critical thing is safety; of course, commercialization and investment should be planned according to this view.” He also commented on the direction of business that will be considered important in the era of self-driving cars. “In the mobile era, it is not a manufacturer but a service company like Facebook makes profits” Cha said. “The self-driving car market will be the same.” This means that companies that only manufactures vehicles will not earn profit from the market. Instead, companies equipped with a cloud data center will be the beneficiary of the market industry.
“The market is already transforming into an era of self-driving cars, even though we don’t actually recognize the change in the real life,” Cha said. He pointed out two selling points of the carmaker, which are design and computer performance in the car as examples. It means that consumers are no longer interested in things like engine performance. Nevertheless, he reiterated that the era of self-driving cars does not come fast as we expected because many companies must develop vehicles in a safe environment. Companies need to be cautious, because if the product is not developed in a safe environment, it will cause a situation where businesses will have to take unlimited responsibility in case of accidents.
Also, he claimed that national level support is mandatory for the establishment of cloud computing services, which will play a big role in the era of self-driving cars. “Although Korea has already lagged behind in the field of cloud computing, we need to provide support at the government level to prepare for the upcoming era of self-driving era,” said Cha. With cloud providers targeting specific areas including healthcare, self-driving, and cloud for smart cities, such support will be necessary to prepare services that match those that come.
Jeong Jiseong, CEO of SOS Lab and Jang Hyouk the CEO of Polariant also participated in the event, providing their insights to see present and future of mobility technologies. Meanwhile, True Innovation is an external partner program of SK Telecom Open Collabo Center, providing incubation program to startups. True Innovation has been holding monthly meet-up events for various innovative sectors including media, drones and the Internet of Things, while accelerating corporate business expansion and innovation, establishing a culture of openness, sharing and cooperation.
