China’s self-driving truck leaders say AI breakthroughs won’t accelerate rollout — here’s why

The steering wheel on an Inceptio Technology autonomous truck in Jinan, Shandong Province, China, on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | BEIJING — While AI updates make headlines every few weeks, those advances are not enough to get self-driving vehicles on the road more quickly. That's according to Chinese autonomous trucking companies, who say that improvements in large language model, from Anthropic's Claude to China's DeepSeek, have little impact on the timeline for vehicle deployment. “The world's best linguistics [expert] doesn't mean he's a good driver," Pony.ai CEO James Peng told reporters last week. "AI is a very broad term. They're completely different things. Absolutely ... zero relevance." "When we process language, when we play sports, when we drive we all use different skills," he said. Autonomous driving uses artificial intelligence to imitate a human driver with a combination of sensors, chips and algorithms. But the real-world training data needed is very different from what powers large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, requiring what's called world models. Inceptio, a self-driving truck startup, is still sticking to its timeline for a mid-2028 commercialization milestone, unaffected by the broad advances in AI, CEO Julian Ma told CNBC. …