Wayve Announces Lingo, a Car that Explains what it Does and Why

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TLDR:

AI Research of the Week: Wayve’s Lingo-1, the Model that Speaks Back to You

Leaders: The Truth about AI’s Silent Killer

🤯 AI Research of the week 🤯

In the near future, you might be able to speak with your car.

Huh?

Let me digress.

One of the coolest, if not the coolest, applications of AI is autonomous driving.

Until last year, autonomous driving systems were considered the most advanced AI models in the world.

But, despite this fact, they are far and wide the least trusted models in the world. And according to Forbes, not only this trust issue isn’t decreasing as models get better, but it’s actually increasing up to 55% from last year alone, to the point that only 9% of Americans trust them.

Out of the many reasons for this distrust, one of the most common ones mentioned is the lack of transparency in the model’s decisions.

Now, Wayve, a UK company that specializes in this sector, has announced their LINGO-1 model, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that can explain and reason the decisions behind driving actions taken by the autonomous driving system.

As you’ll see below, the model reacts to real-life observations and is able to predict what the actions of the car will be based on those observations.

And not only that… you can actively chat with it.

But first and foremost, just why?

The Transparency Problem

Put simply, current autonomous driving systems are far away from what most people would think of when talking about autonomous vehicles.

According to the Society of Automotive Engineers, or SAE, there are six levels of autonomous driving, ranging from 0 to 5.

Level 5 means that the car is in complete control and responsible independently of the situation. From Levels 0 to 2, the human is still responsible.

And when thinking about autonomous driving vehicles, almost everyone thinks about Tesla.

However, to this day Tesla is still stuck in Level 2, and only a considerably small group of cars has managed to move onto Level 3, a feat recently achieved by Mercedes’ EQS sedan and S-classes.

Level 3 means that, in some very specific situations, the car can be put in fully autonomous mode. Still far away from the goal.

But most of the time, the trust issues humans show are far less rational than we may think. It’s most often pure irrational fear, just like people fear airplanes when it’s far and wide the safest transportation system.

The numbers speak for themselves.

There is 1 in 1.2 million chance of dying in a plane crash. This number drops to 1 in 5,000 when talking about cars.

Consequently, the idea behind a “talking car” isn’t only about reducing car accidents, it’s also about giving humans a sense of control by making the car’s decisions more transparent.

But how does it work?

A Language and Vision…

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