Wayve
Assembly Line
Wayve raises more than $1B in Series C
Wayve has raised $1.05 billion in its Series C funding round, the company announced. The artificial intelligence-powered autonomous driving company plans to use the new funding to bolster its goal of reimagining autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence - which is meant to extend past generative AI and large language models.
The company out of London received the funding from a group of investors led by SoftBank Group, with input from Nvidia, a new investor, and Microsoft, an existing investor.
LINGO-2: Driving with Natural Language
This blog introduces LINGO-2, a driving model that links vision, language, and action to explain and determine driving behavior, opening up a new dimension of control and customization for an autonomous driving experience. LINGO-2 is the first closed-loop vision-language-action driving model (VLAM) tested on public roads.
Our previous model, LINGO-1, was an open-loop driving commentator that leveraged vision-language inputs to perform visual question answering (VQA) and driving commentary on tasks such as describing scene understanding, reasoning, and attention—providing only language as an output. This research model was an important first step in using language to understand what the model comprehends about the driving scene. LINGO-2 takes that one step further, providing visibility into the decision-making process of a driving model. LINGO-2 combines vision and language as inputs and outputs, both driving action and language, to provide a continuous driving commentary of its motion planning decisions. LINGO-2 adapts its actions and explanations in accordance with various scene elements and is a strong first indication of the alignment between explanations and decision-making. By linking language and action directly, LINGO-2 sheds light on how AI systems make decisions and opens up a new level of control and customization for driving.