The world now knows that Tesla's Elon Musk thinks that high-precision GPS maps for self-driving cars are a "really bad idea." During the company's Autonomy Day in April, Musk made it abundantly clear that too much dependency on HD Maps can turn an autonomous vehicle (AV) into a "system that becomes extremely brittle," making it more difficult to adapt. The rest of the automotive industry, however, pretty much believes that AV could use an HD map as, at least, a backup system. "HD Maps are all about adding intelligence to improve the performance and safety of automated vehicles," said Phil Magney, founder and principal at VSI Labs. As Matt Preyss, Product Marketing Manager at HERE, explained, HD maps are not the familiar GPS helpers used by human drivers.

Most AI platform suppliers have been obsessed lately with autonomous vehicles. This week, Nvidia escalated the obsession by spreading the epidemic to "autonomous machines." At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference held here, CEO Jensen Huang wound up and pitched Nvidia AGX, a series of embedded AI high-performance computers built around Nvidia's new Xavier processors, for a host of robotic and autonomous machines. Phil Magney, founder and principal advisor at VSI Labs, called Nvidia "shrewd" to extend the reach of the architecture, since most competitors are focusing exclusively on automated cars. "As we know, there are lots of human driven machines out there where removing the operator is the goal. Nvidia's new partners in Japan have their bases covered with these announcements."