Hi Frang
I haven't looked back at my original post but do recall if being very sequential and clear that Intel came before Akida with respect to Mercedes.
Your find of Gunjan Gupta could well flip the timeline and therefore change the narrative slightly. Ie. They tried akida, then Loihi.... But the narrative is still materially unchanged.
That narrative being: Mercedes have looked at both Loihi and Akida and as we know, utilised akida in the EQXX.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me we're talking about semantics here and agree on the overall outcome?
Hi
@SERA2g,
no, we’re not only talking about semantics here, and neither do I agree with you on what you’ve termed “the overall outcome”, as the way you suggestively worded it by naming Intel’s neuromorphic processor first (“Mercedes have looked at both Loihi and Akida and as we know, utilised akida in the EQXX”) implies a deliberate decision against Loihi in favour of Akida, which appears not to align with what really occurred.
Frankly speaking, I find it rather bizarre that you replied to me without even bothering to take the time to re-read your 26 January 2022 HC post (that you reposted here on TSE on 7 February 2022), which you say you recall “being very sequential and clear that Intel came before Akida with respect to Mercedes”, even though I had specifically pointed out that the post in question did NOT contain any convincing evidence thereof. Merely a far-fetched assumption on your part that just doesn’t hold water.
Feel free to provide proper proof, though: hard evidence that the MB - Intel collaboration on NC
predates the MB - BrainChip collaboration.
As far as I can tell,
all available evidence points to Mercedes-Benz having worked with Akida since at least as early as October 2019 for in-car gesture recognition in combination with event-based cameras, and from at least mid-2020 onwards on powering hotword detection in the VISION EQXX, and that they only got access to Loihi months after they had already started working on the concept car that utilised Akida to make the “Hey, Mercedes” voice control system five to ten times more efficient than conventional voice control.
And if my timeline is correct, it means the prevailing narrative that is apparent in the FF quote I shared in my previous post, is fundamentally flawed, as it suggests that the Mercedes-Benz engineers favoured cool new kid on the block Akida over Loihi, although they had already invested years of research into Intel’s neuromorphic processor
prior to being introduced to BrainChip (read: wasted a lot of money).
And yet you claim “But the narrative is still materially unchanged”?
No,
@SERA2g, absolutely not.
When we apply Ockham’s razor, the simple and obvious reason why MB went with Akida to optimise the energy efficiency of keyword spotting in the EQXX appears to have been that it was the neuromorphic processor that was already available to them at the time - and they evidently ended up happy with what it accomplished and have verifiably shown continued interest in Akida over the following years.
Would they have been more/equally/less happy with Loihi at the time? We will never know. We do know, however, that consortium lead Mercedes-Benz picked Loihi over Akida (and over other neuromorphic processors) for the NAOMI4Radar project last year, and that they are happy with those results, too.
Project lead Gerrit Ecke, who as I mentioned earlier this week has now left MB to embark on a new adventure with German defense-tech startup Project Q, said the following about the concluded multi-partner project that ran from June 2024 to August 2025 and was partially funded (56%) by the German government:
🎤 On stage at ELIV 2025 – Naomi4Radar: Advancing Autonomous Driving with High-Efficiency Neuromorphic Radar Heute auf der Bühne bei der ELIV 2025: Franziska Ott (TWT GmbH Science & Innovation ) und Geoffrey Kasenbacher (Mercedes-Benz AG ) präsentierten im Track “Automotive AI – From Sensor to...
www.linkedin.com
Here is a (non-exhaustive) compilation of verifiable facts surrounding MB & NC, which some readers may find useful (additional links in my previous posts on this topic):
- By the time MB engineers started working on the EQXX drawing board around mid-2020 (roughly: date of reveal minus 18 months), they had already been evaluating Akida for at least 9 months or so (cf. Gunjan Gupta’s LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptagunjan19/).
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-476278
-
Approximately half a year after embarking on the EQXX concept car project, Mercedes-Benz joined the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), which gave them access to Loihi.
Intel Labs publicly announced MB as a new corporate member of the INRC on 3 December 2020. There is no conclusive evidence that they were somehow evaluating Loihi through a collaborating partner any earlier than that.
In the following LinkedIn post, Magnus Östberg confirms that Mercedes-Benz became an INRC Research Member in 2020 only:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/magnus-%C3%B6stberg_neuromorphic-ml-ai-activity-7159123320410423297-Y-aX?
- On New Year’s Eve 2023,
@Pom down under spotted the CV of Arizona State University PhD student and former BrainChip ML intern Vishnu Prateek Kakaraparthi, which revealed that one of the things he had done between June 2023 and August 2023 while interning at BrainChip was that he “spearheaded the development of distracted driving technology, achieving energy and processing gains, positioning for potential project collaboration with Mercedes, and showcasing the capabilities of the AKD1000 in the automotive safety domain.”
When I revisited his LinkedIn profile to check out if he had ever added information on whether this potential collaboration eventually came to fruition (the answer is no, which to me suggests we may have lost out to a competitor at the time),
I newly discovered that he had also worked as the lead on “
neuromorphic anomaly detection research for Mercedes Vision EQXX Concept, achieving 4x energy efficiency”.
He even lists this as one of his career highlights!
Hmhhh, that was presumably also something he accomplished during his 2023 BRN summer internship (cf. what I marked in yellow in his LinkedIn profile), which means
said anomaly detection research would have taken place 1.5 years after the EQXX had been revealed on the world stage. Interesting…
At the same time, it gives us another hint that the potential collaboration project with MB on distracted driving technology may not have eventuated, as surely he would also have listed that under career highlights?!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekvishnu/
- We also know that between February 2024 and February 2025 two working students from Uni Stuttgart (employed consecutively) - Sreelakshmi Rameshan and Krishnaprasad Thoombayil Satheesh - wrote their Master’s theses on topics involving comparisons between Akida, Loihi 2 and SynSense Speck - the more recent one was on experimenting with converting ANNs to SNNs for child presence detection as well as direct training of SNNs and deploying all those (I assume) SNNs to BrainChip, Intel and SynSense neuromorphic hardware. Unfortunately, that thesis hasn’t (yet?) been uploaded to the Uni Stuttgart online publications server, so we can’t check out the results of this benchmarking.
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-476278
- In addition, we know that Mercedes has also been evaluating neuromorphic processors by Innatera and highly likely by Applied Brain Research (Chris Eliasmith’s University of Waterloo spin-out), and is also aware of Akida 2.0.
Plus, that Neurobus was working with Mercedes-Benz on ADAS sometime last year (Akida? Loihi? Possibly benchmarking both in combination with Prophesee event-based sensors? BrainChip and Intel were both listed as partners - alongside with Prophesee - on the Neurobus website before it was redesigned earlier this year).
In a July 2025 Neurobus job ad, Mercedes-Benz, however, no longer showed up in the list of partners they were working with at that time. Maybe the project was already concluded by the time Gregor Lenz stepped down from his role as CTO?
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-440033
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-439352
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-441454
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-440033
- After a BRN retail shareholder had publicly expressed his hope on LinkedIn that MB would be implementing BrainChip technology into their consumer vehicles soon, Magnus Östberg responded by saying “We look at all possible solutions!”
I received many great questions from the community in response to my recent post on neuromorphic computing, so I’ll jump right in and answer a few. How does a more powerful processor increase energy efficiency? #AI is already used in advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and infotainment...
www.linkedin.com
- In October 2024, Mercedes-Benz not only announced
a) the partially government-funded NAOMI4Radar project (06/24-08/25) to optimise radar data processing in autonomous vehicles using NC and (according to project partner TWT GmbH Science & Innovation) to demonstrate the industrial applicability of Loihi 2 (
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-473794)
as well as
b) a cooperation with Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences focusing on event-based cameras (Project EVSC = Event Vision Stream Compression, cf.
https://www.h-ka.de/die-hochschule-.../kameratechnologien-im-neuromorphic-computing), but they also shared
c) that they had signed an MoU with the University of Waterloo “to collaborate on research led by Prof. Chris Eliasmith in the field of neuromorphic computing. The focus is on the development of algorithms for advanced driving assistance systems […] While preserving vehicle range, safety systems could, for example, detect traffic signs, lanes and objects much better, even in poor visibility, and react faster. Neuromorphic computing has the potential to reduce the energy required to process data for autonomous driving by 90 percent compared to current systems.”
https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/news/open-innovation-canada.html
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-443917
- In December 2024, Mercedes-Benz invited journalists to an Open Day at their Future Technolologies Lab, where they briefed them on promising innovations from their “early-tech kitchen”, including on the potential benefits of neuromorphic computing. In this context, they made it clear that they consider NC as part of a research project, and that they were expecting such neuromorphic hardware to become available in the 2030s…
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-442024
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-442165
This time frame was also confirmed by Mercedes-Benz to a TSE forum member on LinkedIn on 29 January 2025:
“… we’re currently looking into neuromorphic computing as part of a research project. Depending on the further development progress, integration could become possible within a timeframe of 5 to 10 years”.
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-449452
- October 2025: According to Athos Silicon Co-Founder and CTO François Piednoël, who used to be the former mSoC Chief Architect with Mercedes-Benz North America until (Northern hemisphere) spring, Akida does not pass minimum requirements for Level 3 and Level 4 automated driving.
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-476147
- We do not (yet) know what neuromorphic technology is hiding under the bonnet (or in the trunk) of the Vision Iconic, the show car revealed at the Shanghai Fashion Week on Tuesday. But since it is described as having Level 4, it seems rather unlikely to me it will be Akida, at least with regard to any safety-critical functions (cf. François Piednoël’s above comment).
Allow me to introduce the stunning new Vision Iconic show car. With this automotive masterpiece, Mercedes-Benz shows what the future can look like when it’s shaped by tradition, while remaining uncompromisingly modern. Let’s start with the extraordinary exterior. The silhouette appears to be...
www.linkedin.com
Did I miss anything of importance? And please correct me should anyone spot any mistakes.
