Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, in a blog post on parent company Intel’s news feed insolently titled “Innovation Requires Originality“, openly mocked Nvidia’s “Safety Force Field,” pointing out innumerable similarities to Mobileye’s “Responsibility Sensitive Safety” paper from 2017 featuring an autonomous safety car model.
He writes:
It is clear Nvidia’s leaders have continued their pattern of imitation as their so-called “first-of-its-kind” safety concept is a close replica of the RSS model we published nearly two years ago. In our opinion, SFF is simply an inferior version of RSS dressed in green and black. To the extent there is any innovation there, it appears to be primarily of the linguistic variety.
Mobileye founder & CEO and Intel SVP Prof. Amnon Shashua has openly accused Nvidia of copying the safety model of his company’s autonomous cars.
Many did, and as Shashua factors out, together with Nvidia, not less than for a short while in 2018, after which Nvidia pulled out of collaboration talks. To take action after which, a 12 months afterwards, suggest a system that’s, if not an identical, then not less than remarkably comparable, and with out crediting or mentioning Mobileye is suspicious to say the least.
On an official post on Intel’s website, Shashua recounts that the company invited its rivals to adopt its model out of a desire to create a unified standard for the industry and to cooperate with government to protect autonomous car safety and the way its decision were taken. He said that the responses were positive and there was extensive cooperation following it.
Shashua said that they were happy that Nvidia joined the initiative and surprised when they decided to withdraw from it. Shashua wrote, “Imagine our surprise last week when Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, announced a “first-of-its-kind” safety model for AVs. Curious to see what “first-of-its-kind” innovation Nvidia had created, we eagerly read the publicly released white paper about Safety Force Field (SFF), only to have the eerie feeling that we were looking in the mirror.”
He added, “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Nvidia must think very highly of us.”
“At Mobileye, we believe in technology innovation, not linguistic innovation. We have openly invited and are enjoying active collaboration with industry and government partners around the globe. It is unfortunate that rather than collaborate with us, Nvidia felt it necessary to follow us yet again, creating confusion where there could have been cohesion. Mobileye has invested enormous resources to develop RSS, and Mobileye has obtained intellectual property rights to protect these investments.”
Nvidia has declined to comment.