Toyota is investing $50m into driver-assisted Artificial Intelligence, in partnership with MIT and Stanford, according to Fortune. The research will be focused on helping human drivers avoid accidents by adding AI to their cars.
This is in contrast to the seemingly much more ambitious self-driving cars being pursued by Google and others. Although Toyota itself demonstrated it’s own self-driving Lexus in 2013, it seems that they also believe that people will still want to drive their own cars. By investing in AI technology to augment human drivers, Toyota seems to be hedging its bets.
There is still a long way to go before we will see fully autonomous cars and trucks commonly on the roads. The fruits of this research may be installed in your car much sooner than that.
Sources:
Toyota partners with MIT and Stanford on artificial intelligence – Fortune
On Machine Intelligence 