Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the company is working on robotics applications beyond self-driving vehicles, as the electric vehicle maker increases focus on physical AI.
The remarks come less than two months after Rivian disclosed that it had created Mind Robotics, a spinoff company focused on industrial AI applications.
“We have other things we’re doing in the vision-based robotic space as well,” Scaringe said during an appearance on the TBPN show.
“And so we came to the view that having our own inference was going to be really valuable,” he added referring to the decision of developing its own processor.
The Irvine, California-based EV maker secured approximately $110 million in external seed capital for the new venture, which it said would focus on “the advancement of industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate.”
Scaringe did not elaborate on specific robotics applications under development.
The firm marks Rivian‘s second spinoff this year, following the micromobility-focused company ALSO.
The CEO detailed Rivian‘s autonomous driving efforts, revealing the company has been working on an end-to-end trained model since early 2022.
The system uses millions of miles of driving data accumulated from second-generation vehicles, which launched more than a year ago, to build what Scaringe described as “a foundation model for how to drive.”
Current Gen 2 vehicles run on an Nvidia platform with approximately 200 TOPS of compute, 55 megapixels of camera resolution, and an array of radars. However, Rivian has developed a more powerful in-house processor to enable higher levels of autonomy.
“The in-house processor, it’s a significant step up. So it’s 800 TOPS,” Scaringe said. “It’s got 35 billion transistors on the silicon. The neural net’s capable of processing 5 billion pixels per second. So this is like an incredibly powerful platform.”
The chip, manufactured in partnership with TSMC, took nearly four years to develop.
Rivian will pair the processor with upgraded cameras and a new LiDAR sensor mounted at the top of the windshield to achieve what Scaringe called Level 4 autonomy — the ability for a vehicle to operate without a driver.
“It could pick your kids up from school or drop you at the airport,” Scaringe said.
Last week, Scaringe pushed back against critics who question whether the company can turn profitable before exhausting its cash reserves.
“We have a pretty clear line of sight to it and as you see with our guidance,” Scaringe said following the company’s Autonomy Day event.
“We’re not saying we’re going to be profitable next week. We recognize that we need to ramp production, we recognize we’re investing heavily in technology. What we’re doing is really robust work on cash flow and to make sure we’re protected for that,” he added.
