Generative AI is coming to your car

Driving the news: Qualcomm on Tuesday announced it is bringing its next-generation Oryon processor to its in-car computer systems for both entertainment and automated driving.

• Already used in PCs and coming soon to high-end smartphones, Oryon puts a tremendous amount of computing power inside the car.
• Mercedes said it would use Qualcomm's Snapdragon Cockpit Elite chip to power future in-car information systems.
• Qualcomm also announced a partnership with Google to jointly promote Android Automotive OS and Qualcomm's digital cockpit to automakers.

Zoom in: Generative AI in the car will ideally let drivers get help with everything from finding the nearest cheap gas to pointing out landmarks to understanding a dashboard warning light.

• "We think people will be able to truly converse with their cars, not just like an AI chatbot, but actually with intelligence around what the vehicle can see, what the vehicle knows about itself and what it knows about the driver," Patrick Brady, VP of Automotive at Google, said in an interview.
• The power increases further when AI is combined with self-driving abilities. In a concept video, Qualcomm featured a car's AI assistant telling the driver: "There is no parking nearby. You can unload here and I will park the car."
• China's Li Auto showed an AI assistant that can answer all the questions that kids ask while you are in the car, while also powering travel-related and entertainment tasks and remembering its owner's preferences.
• Other demos featured in-car assistants rerouting drivers, identifying nearby restaurants and purchasing tickets to a museum after confirming its hours.

Yes, but: Despite efforts already underway, genAI in the car will take some time to arrive. Carmakers design new models years before they arrive in the showroom.

• Qualcomm said the new car chips will be "sampling" in 2025, suggesting the first cars with the processors won't hit the road until after that. That said, Qualcomm says its previous generation of chips can also support genAI experiences.
• "We designed our [older] Snapdragon Digital Cockpit for cars that are launching right now," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Axios in an interview earlier this week. "Now, genAI arrived and we can retrofit in software."

Between the lines: In-car use is likely to require models running both in the car and from the cloud, with the former needed for time-sensitive tasks and the latter for broader queries.

Disclosure: Reporting for this event took place at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, where I am moderating an AI-related panel on Wednesday. Qualcomm paid for my travel-related costs.

Editor's note: This story was corrected to reflect that the new Qualcomm partnership will promote Android Automotive OS (not Android Auto) and that Patrick Brady's title at Google is VP of Automotive.