This is a very, very smart move for Intel...
Whilst we tend to think of Mobileye as "the guys that made AP1 possible"... the reality is that the Deep Learning breakthroughs that occurred around 2012 made the 10+ years of investment in their traditional, human-trained computer vision algorithms obsolete almost overnight. DL + GPU acceleration quickly exceeded the best human trained networks in a just a few months.
Of course, Mobileye know all of this stuff. They're incredibly smart people. Their CEO Amnon is super, super smart. They already have existing deals and relationships with almost every major car manufacturer in the world, plus trust with regulators. They have a unique knowledge of the space. Intel have lots and lots of money and resources, they're incredible chip guys, plus their push into 5G is significant for connected cars. It's a formidable pairing.
Meanwhile, whilst Tesla was busy injecting steroids into the 7+ year old technology that forms the base of AP1... Mobileye have been busy uilding out their own next generation stuff: deep sensing, crowd sourced mapping, road management, driving policy and custom silicon. I'm pretty sure that's why Musk said that, at some point, it would became 'inevitable' that they would part ways. Their roadmaps just... diverged
Nvidia, however, have definitely gone all-in on AI... and their progress is rapid - both in software and hardware. Hardware wise, the DrivePX2 supercomputer found in our HW2 Teslas is already out-of-date, with Xavier coming later this year - a smaller, faster, lighter and more power efficient package. Their DriveNet reference network is getting better every day.
Of course, Mobileye specialise in driving systems exclusively... have their own human supervised network trained
specifically for recognising driving related features; they can augment with an additional layer of training via DNNs for even better accuracy. It's all they think about, all day every day. They also have a fundamentally different core business belief to Nvidia: Nvidia want to build the platform and the reference standard, but believe it's up to the car companies to implement their own individual networks on their platform. They want that competition to drive (heh) innovation in the space. Mobileye want to build the hardware and the software, in one time-tested package, then sell that into the cars.
I suppose it's Apple vs Microsoft all over again... and I suppose Nvidia is Microsoft in this case.
I hope it crashes less.