Hyundai Motor Group says it will launch a specially designed large language model (LLM) that will be part of a new infotainment operating system and an artificial intelligence voice assistant in its upcoming passenger cars.
Chang-Hyeon Song, President and Head of New Transportation as a Service (TaaS) Division within Hyundai Motor Group, said TechnologyRadar in an exclusive interview that his division was already working alongside Naver, which Song refers to as “the Google of South Korea,” to cooperate on building its current LLM model for use in future Hyundai models.
“The problem with current LLMs is that they don't have access to vehicle data,” Song told us during a discussion at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“These models don't have access to phone contacts, they don't have access to vehicle settings or driver data, which means current models can't give users all the answers,” he says.
This year's CES 2024 was filled with big learning model announcements and press releases outlining upcoming in-vehicle AI assistants. Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz were arguably the most vocal, with the former announcing that, along with the Volkswagen Group's Skoda brand, it would introduce ChatGPT to its vehicles.
However, VW made it very clear that ChatGPT would not have access to vehicle information; instead, your IDA voice assistant would handle vehicle requests.
Song said he wanted to create a 'hybrid' system that would send generic questions to Naver and other AI chatbot providers for answers, but would also use voice assistants with Mapbox's MapGPT smart location AI for conversational navigation requests and Hyundai's in-house developed voice assistant for vehicle functionality. The idea is that everything works in harmony, in theory.
Song did not divulge details, but a recent Mapbox announcement indicated that the pair is already working on a solution that will “allow drivers to use voice commands to control vehicle systems, including climate control, windows and music.” , as well as integrate popular external applications such as open table and tripadvisor in the next navigation system, which Song says will arrive with a new infotainment platform in 2026.
“I like CarPlay, but at the moment we can't give that system access to vehicle data,” Song told us. “I want our next infotainment system to be as close to CarPlay as possible, where everything is taken care of by an ecosystem and a voice assistant,” she added.
Song, a former Apple and Microsoft employee, is also the founder of Naver Labs, the R&D unit of South Korea's largest web search engine and global ICT brand Naver, which goes some way to explaining his decision. to leverage Naver's existing research in LLM.
Software everywhere
Beyond infotainment upgrades, Song's talent in the tech industry (he's CEO of autonomous transportation-as-a-service startup 42dot) has been called upon to make Hyundai Motor's 'Software Defined Everything' (SDx) strategy a reality. Group, which seeks to transform “all devices, fleets and ecosystems in motion into valuable assets through advanced software and artificial intelligence,” according to the brand.
This will have a big impact on Hyundai's next big step, which will take it beyond today's private vehicles and into a fully autonomous future.
“The goal of the next two years is to introduce a new infotainment system platform with built-in AI assistant and offer an application marketplace to customers,” Song explains, bringing the conversation to the present.
“To do this, we're opening up our API to third-party developers and saying 'here's our data, try to improve what we have and build on what we've built,' so we can develop a great app that uses vehicle data to offer more to the user.” “I think that's what sets us apart from a lot of other OEMs: the fact that we're open,” he adds.
When asked if Hyundai is the first to do something like this, Song mentions Mercedes-Benz and the work the German auto giant is doing on its own MB.OS platform, which also promises to link vehicles to the cloud and to the IoT. It was also not said what the 'killer app' would be.
“Initially, the market will offer services, such as user-based insurance, which uses the vehicle data capabilities I mentioned, but we don't want to offer too many features too soon. We want the initial features to be tightly integrated with the vehicle.”, adds Song.
