For years, the prevailing narrative among BRN retail shareholders has been that Mercedes-Benz engineers had trialled Intel Loihi for a number of years before switching to Akida for their VISION EQXX concept car. Which could only mean one thing, right?
“Fact” Finder, for example, has repeatedly brought this up and claimed the following on HC as recently as last month:
[Sorry, @CHIPS, TSE will not allow direct links to that other website, but you can search for the post under the author’s name and the 7 September date…
]
[…]
Where is the evidence for this? Can anyone provide links to verifiable sources in order to substantiate the above claim? If yes, please share them here with us. I’m especially curious to find out how MB would have managed to work with Loihi long before it was even announced (which was in September 2017) and officially launched (in January 2018).
Here are the facts and timelines that I have so far established for myself.
While I cannot rule out that I may have overlooked something, this whole Mercedes-found-a-new-love-narrative has always seemed pretty fishy to me, and I now happened to stumble across additional evidence to the contrary.
This post is not meant to turn into a discussion about which neuromorphic processor is superior or that only one of them is commercially available as I write - it is about the veracity of the narrative we have been fed for so long by fellow forum members.
In 2018, Intel established the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), which includes academic, government and industry research groups. The INRC’s first corporate members were announced in November 2019: Accenture, Airbus, GE and Hitachi. Mercedes-Benz, however, didn’t join the INRC until late 2020.
Intel announced the Neuromorphic Computing Research Collaborators which include faculty members Jim Plank and Garett Rose as well as alumnus Catherine Schuman.
eecs.utk.edu
Nov. 19, 2019 — Today, Intel announced the first corporate members – Accenture, Airbus, GE and Hitachi – to join the fast-growing Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC). The INRC has […]
www.hpcwire.com
At Intel Labs Day on 3 December 2020, which was held as a virtual event, Intel announced “the addition of Lenovo, Logitech, Mercedes-Benz and Prophesee to explore the value of neuromorphic computing for business use cases”.
www.intc.com
The following quote by Jasmin Eichler, then Director of Future Technologies at MB, gives no indication whatsoever that Mercedes-Benz had already been evaluating Loihi prior to joining INRC. Unsurprisingly, I should add, since becoming an INRC Research Member (for which a sufficiently detailed project proposal must first be submitted) has always been a prerequisite for being granted access to Loihi.
And no, the mere fact that Accenture Labs - as an early INRC member - had been working with “an undisclosed automotive client” on voice command recognition for interaction with smart vehicles using Loihi in 2020, before Mercedes-Benz joined the INRC, does not prove that this automotive client was Mercedes-Benz (cf
@SERA2g ’s post kicking off the
BRN - Mercedes subthread:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-mercedes.150/).
Experimental computer chips that try to mimic the way human brains work could accelerate the use of voice and gesture commands in cars, researchers say.
www.wsj.com
Besides, MB have their own team of future technology researchers and thus wouldn’t have needed to rely on Accenture to explore Loihi on their behalf.
I also doubt Intel would have worded their Intel Labs Day 2020 announcement the way they did if the undisclosed carmaker on behalf of which Accenture was evaluating Loihi had been the same carmaker who had just joined them. The same goes for the author of the WSJ article - if the promising results of the Accenture evaluation had been the reason for the “undisclosed automotive client” to eventually join the INRC themselves, why still keep it a secret in retrospect now they have become a research member? That doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyway, it is definitely not conclusive evidence to support the above claim that Mercedes-Benz had been working with Intel “for years” before they had a change of heart, after falling head over heels in love with Akida.
Oh, and before anyone suggests it: I already DID scroll through all 11 pages of the
BRN - Mercedes subthread, but couldn’t find any proof whatsoever of MB’s collaboration with Intel on neuromorphic computing predating the one with BrainChip...
One thing was clear to me from the outset: We know from the horse’s mouth that the VISION EQXX concept car (unveiled during CES in early January 2022) went from idea to prototype in only 18 months, so unless they added in the idea of implementing the voice control function on a neuromorphic chip at a later stage or changed their mind midway about which neuromorphic chip to work with (both highly unlikely, though), the relevant MB engineers must have been familiar with Akida by no later than mid-2020.
Months before Mercedes-Benz even joined the INRC, that is.
Remember the original Mercedes-Benz press release that mentioned
systems (in the plural!) based on Akida developed by their engineers? I’d always wondered what else they had explored…
Range and efficiency are set to define the electric era. Exceptional range will make electric cars suitable for every journey and help to increase overall adoption.
media.mbusa.com
“Working with California-based artificial intelligence experts BrainChip, Mercedes-Benz engineers developed systems based on BrainChip's Akida hardware and software.”
… and now I know - at least in part!
Voilà,
here is proof that Mercedes-Benz were already evaluating Akida for in-car gesture recognition in combination with event-based cameras between October 2019 and June 2020!
I discovered this intriguing piece of information in the LinkedIn work experience section of Gunjan Gupta, now a Senior Software Developer with SAP, who was placed with Mercedes-Benz as a working student during her time when she was enrolled for an IT Master’s programme at Uni Stuttgart - just like other Master students after her, eg Sreelakshmi Rameshan from February to September 2024 (
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-443909 as well as
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-443910)
and Krishnaprasad Thoombayil Satheesh from August 2024 to February 2025 (
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-468997).
While the two of them also wrote their Master’s theses during their industrial placement (both of them doing comparisons involving Akida, Loihi 2 and SynSense Speck), Gunjan Gupta wrote her Master’s thesis on an unrelated topic and only after her part-time job as a working student with MB (1 year 5 months in total) had ended. Why she did not pick a topic relating to what she had worked on with the BrainChip ADE (Akida Development Environment), we can only speculate.
So to sum it up: If we are to believe Gunjan Gupta’s LinkedIn profile (and I don’t have any reason to doubt the information provided), Mercedes-Benz researchers were already working with Akida as early as October 2019 - more than a year before they joined the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community!
This timeline also explains, by the way, why there was never any announcement about Mercedes-Benz having joined the EAP (Early Access Program) - just like Ford, they had already become a BrainChip customer months before the EAP was officially launched in June 2020. As I noted before, MB were, however, referred to as one of BrainChip’s “Marquee EAP customers” from at least as early as September 2023 (
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-464731).
So unless someone can come up with compelling evidence for the claim that Mercedes-Benz had indeed worked with Loihi “for years”, before picking Akida as their neuromorphic processor of choice for their VISION EQXX concept car, let’s banish this widely held belief to where I strongly suspect it belongs: to the realm of myths and fairy tales.