How AlexNet Sparked Nvidia’s Decade-Long Investment in Autonomous Vehicles
Nvidia’s self-driving tech journey began with the 2012 AI breakthrough AlexNet, shaping the future of autonomous vehicles.
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How AlexNet Sparked Nvidia’s Decade-Long Investment in Autonomous Vehicles
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was chock-full of announcements. But the company also snuck in a little history lesson. Image:David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural network architecture that gained widespread attention in 2012 when it won a computer image-recognition contest. Designed by computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever (who’d go on to found OpenAI) and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, AlexNet achieved 84.7% accuracy in an academic competition called ImageNET. The breakthrough result led to a resurgence of interest in deep learning, a subset of machine learning that leverages neural networks. Turns out, AlexNet spurred Nvidia to go “all in” on autonomous vehicles, the way Huang tells it. “The moment I saw AlexNet — and we’ve been working on computer vision for a long time — the moment I saw AlexNe…
