VW to use ChatGPT in the Golf, Tiguan and ID
Volkswagen has just announced that they will be using ChatGPT (Artificial Intelligence) in the newest editions of the VW Golf, Tiguan and ID. This change has been made as a means of improving in car technology through more advanced voice commands and inputs.
What exactly is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a language model developed by a program called OpenAI and is based on the GPT 3.5 Architecture. It is essentially artificial intelligence that learns from across the internet and can provide detailed human-like responses in a matter of seconds. It is built on something called transformer architecture which are deep learning models that handle sequential data. It is pre-trained on a massive amount of diverse text data pulled from all aspects of the internet. The model then produces the next word in a sentence given the context of the preceding words capturing grammar, context and general knowledge from the data it has been exposed to
When you interact with ChatGPT, you provide a prompt or series of prompts and the model generates responses based on its learned patterns. It is forever learning and can give responses similar to how a human would.
VW has stated that ChatGPT is being used to answer the driver’s general questions as well as control the vehicles infotainment system and air conditioning. Customers adjust functionalities from their vehicle without touching a button, said Kai Gruenitz, VW brand’s technical development chief. “Our customers don’t want to manually adjust their seats … they want to use speech dialogue systems,” he said.
From raising the temperature when it hears “I’m feeling cold” to showing the nearest Indian restaurant upon hearing “I want butter chicken,” the AI can recognise and respond to a range of demands, VW and Cerence executives said.
“Really good voice control is a very difficult challenge. We are convinced that this can only work with large language models based on AI,” Grunitz said.
VW has stated that they are the first volume manufacturer to make the technology a standard feature in their compact segment cars. General Motors said in March last year it was working on a virtual personal assistant using AI models behind ChatGPT.
Some automotive specialists may argue that it is the wrong move to incorporate ChatGPT into vehicles due to the fact that it has been found that the chatbots can serve the wrong information on occasion and OpenAI has recently been targeted with a number of copyright lawsuits, however, Volkwagen has teamed up with a 3rd party company called Cerence who specialise in integrating chatGPT into vehicles. It will be interesting to see how successful this move will be and if any other automakers will make the jump to AI integration as well.