autonomous driving AI model

An autonomous driving AI model is a program that lets a car read its surroundings and decide what to do next so it can drive itself. Just like a human driver looks at the road with their eyes and uses their brain to decide when to turn the wheel or hit the brake, this model looks at the scene captured by the car's cameras and sensors and calculates whether it should brake right now or change lanes.

To build this kind of model, engineers show it huge numbers of real driving scenes in advance and train it on how to act safely in each situation. Once trained, the model runs on a computer inside the car, doing calculations in real time at every moment. Because this requires so much computing power, carmakers have started building dedicated chips just to run these models quickly.

In the article, it appears in a sentence like: "Waymo explained that the new chip both speeds up sensor data processing and directly runs the autonomous driving AI model." Here, the autonomous driving AI model refers not to the chip itself but to the decision-making software that runs on top of it — a distinction that's easy to blur with 'autonomous driving technology' as a whole.