Amazon wants you to throw away your BMW manual and use artificial intelligence instead

When we sat down to discuss Amazon’s push to use artificial intelligence in cars, the first thing Dean Miles, Amazon’s product director for smart cars, told me was, “We want you to throw away your owner’s manual.” At CES 2024. The idea for me initially was – essentially – “Yo, my gosh, we put a chatbot in your car…” Amazon is trying to work with your car, rather than having your car generate The illusion of bad poetry. BMW Makes Your Car the best authoritative source about your car. If it weren’t for the major hurdle of needing to be always online, I would be sold.

So, yes, Amazon is helping BMW put large language models into its cars. Billed as a “Voice Assistant LLM”, this works alongside the existing BMW Personal Assistant to provide more detailed and sophisticated answers to users’ questions. Amazon took a large language model and provided it with more than 300 pages of instructions from the automaker.

Let’s say you want to switch your car to power mode. If you don’t read the instructions, you can tell the car to make the changes for you. In my BMW X1 demo, an early version of the voice assistant was active, and you could also ask the AI ​​for recommendations while driving on the Las Vegas Strip. As far as I’m concerned, the artificial intelligence clearly wants the other cars on the Las Vegas Strip to hear the roar of your engine.

Myers describes this feature as if all those drivers who have no real idea of ​​what their car is capable of can become a “power user,” that is, be able to tell you when Dynamic Traction Control is on and when it’s not. The difference between car owners.

Amazon begins trying to push Alexa assistant into BMW cars Back to 2022. Still, the partnership comes just as the generative artificial intelligence boom is about to engulf Silicon Valley by 2023. The feature is essentially billed as an extension for BMW Assistant, but powered by LLM; Amazon seems to think the Assistant can diagnose possible problems with your car. The feature is still in development, but Myers said it might be able to interpret your car’s diagnostic details to answer more technical questions.

If you owned a car, you’d have to dig through the esoteric owner’s manual to decipher your car’s pop-up diagnostics. My 2024 Hyundai Elantra may be sophisticated enough to tell me that my car’s tires are slightly flat. Still, it’s not sophisticated enough to tell me the correct number it should be at (it’s 33 PSI, in case you’re curious). Unless you’ve read your car’s owner’s manual like you’re cramming for the most important test of your life, you probably don’t know what kind of warning lights are exploding on your dashboard like a Christmas tree.

In addition to replacing your instruction manual, AI still has all the sillier qualities of generative AI. In my demo, the AI ​​took a few seconds between asking a question and getting an answer, and I would have imagined more if the car didn’t hear you correctly. Myers says they don’t want to have easy-to-use distraction machines in cars (to add to the many obvious distraction machines in cars) Car touch screen form). However, the company is still working to develop precise safeguards for what artificial intelligence will or won’t do.

But artificial intelligence cannot work independently of a car’s on-board computer. Currently, AI voice assistants primarily work in the cloud, which requires users to have a satellite connection in the vehicle. Some parts of the AI-powered voice assistant will work without the internet, but the most advanced features won’t be available unless you pay extra for 5G connectivity in your car.

Amazon is also extremely reluctant to discuss what kind of artificial intelligence they use in BMW.it is Amazon’s own language modelBut the company won’t discuss anything about the AI’s ability to compare to any other model, Myers said. All the secrecy and inherent limitations of cloud-connected artificial intelligence hold back Amazon’s luxury car concept, just as I hope a chatbot will eventually tell me how to use my car’s wireless charging.