This self-driving startup is using generative AI to predict traffic

While autonomous driving has long relied on machine learning to plan routes and detect objects, some companies and researchers are now betting that generative AI -- models that take in data of their surroundings and generate predictions -- will help bring autonomy to the next stage. Wayve, a Waabi competitor, released a comparable model last year that is trained on the video that its vehicles collect. Waabi's model works in a similar way to image or video generators like OpenAI's DALL-E and Sora. It takes point clouds of lidar data, which visualize a 3D map of the car's surroundings, and breaks them into chunks, similar to how image generators break photos into pixels. Based on its training data, Copilot4D then predicts how all points of lidar data will move.