Austria's AI Brain Has a Plan to Take Down Waymo and Tesla
Silicon Valley has an early lead in driverless cars, but a collaborative effort across Europe wants to close the gap.
Source: Daimler AG
Think of the European automobile industry and countries like Germany come to mind, with its luxury cars whizzing down the speed-limit-less autobahn. Or France’s quirky Citroens and space-age Renaults. Or even the sensible Swedes and their sturdy Volvos.
Austria? Not so much. But the Alpine state is at the forefront of some cutting-edge research that stands to reshape the future of transportation, in particular driverless-car technology. And the epicenter of this push is Linz, that medieval city on the banks of the Danube river halfway between Salzburg and Vienna. It’s here that researchers from Alphabet Inc. to OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence group co-founded by Elon Musk, come calling for advice from Sepp Hochreiter, the head of the Institute for Machine Learning at Johannes Kepler University.