Toyota has announced that is planning to create a research company specifically focused on artificial intelligence, with the company being based in the Silicon Valley and created as self-driving car technology continues to get more popular.
As part of the creation of the company, Toyota will be investing a whopping $1 billion in research and development in AI, breaking from its usually more cautious stance on self-driving technology.
"I used to say, quite until recently, that we will go ahead with automated drive only if they beat humans in a 24-hour car race," said Akio Toyoda, Toyota President, in a news conference. "But I changed my mind after I got involved with planning of the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games (in Tokyo)."
The five-year endeavor will be known under the name of Toyota Research Institute, and will see the hiring of around 200 new employees. It will start with the creation of laboratories near Stanford and MIT, with Gill Pratt, a former MIT professor and official at DARPA being named CEO of the new company.
Pratt was a program manager at DARPA for five years, with one of his responsibilities being to organize the annual robotics challenge, which saw humans and robots collaborating on disaster response.
The $1 billion investment will be on top of $50 million of investments that the company has already made in research labs at Stanford and MIT.
Of course, Toyota isn't the only Silicon Valley Company working on artificial intelligence and self-driving technology, with the likes of Google being famous for its research in these areas over the past few years. Even strict carmakers have largely ceased to be non-computing companies, with self-driving technology set to become the norm within the next decade or so.
Toyota says that its goal is to bridge the gap between the research happening in university labs and actual product development.
