NVIDIA has announced that e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and search engine provider Baidu Inc are using the company’s chips to run systems that make recommendations. NVIDIA also said ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing has adopted its chips for developing self-driving cars on the road and in its back-end data centres.
From getting its start supplying chips to improve videogame graphics on personal computers, in recent years much of NVIDIA’s growth has come from the use of its chips for artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and other new areas. Making online recommendations has long been a challenging artificial intelligence problem. Using NVIDIA’s chips, Alibaba officials said the click-through rates improved by about 10%.
“The problem of recommendation is related to the explosion of choice,” Paresh Kharya, NVIDIA’s Director of Product Management for Accelerated Computing. “To recommend the right product to the right user at the right time, you need to model the user’s preferences and it takes a lot of different variables to model user preferences.
NVIDIA also said Didi would use its chips in computing systems in autonomous cars on the road that help drive the vehicles, as well as in back-end data centers where data gathered by test vehicles are used to train algorithms for the self-driving cars.
NVIDIA also announced tools to let participating car makers from Germany, China, and North America learn from each others’ training data without having to share data directly; a system called ‘federated’ learning. “This is a way to aggregate different types of data sets from different companies,” Danny Shapiro, Senior Director of Automotive at NVIDIA. “The key thing here is that each (carmaker) or each region can maintain and protect their own data.”
The technology chip supplier officially announced these deals at an event recently in the Chinese city of Suzhou, northwest of Shanghai.
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