NATIX Shoulder-Tapped by €2.9B Electronics Firm to Develop Open-Source, Multi-Camera WFM

Valeo, a French technology company valued at over €2.9B, has partnered with NATIX, a Solana DePIN project, to develop an open-source, multi-camera World Foundation Model (WFM).

By training the WFM on multi-camera, spatial street level imagery, NATIX and Valeo will help manufacturers train safer, more reliable autonomous vehicles (AV).

NATIX’s collaboration with Valeo illustrates a concrete example of Solana DePIN being leveraged for critical, real world infrastructure, highlighting the growing demand for reliable and versatile datasets.

Training Autonomous Vehicles with Solana DePIN

While the internet at large loves to make fun of robotaxis and complain about the decision making of autonomous vehicles today, the reality is that AV proliferation continues to trend upwards. According to Statistica and Market.us, the number of autonomous vehicles in circulation is expected to triple in the next five years, with over 125,000 units on roads by 2030.

Despite the projections, autonomous vehicles still pose a wrath of safety concerns, at least in the eyes of the general public. DePIN-collected data could offer a potential means of resolving these concerns. By tapping into NATIX’s global network of over 268,000 drivers across 171 countries, manufacturers are able to train WFMs on reliable, street-level imagery from the real world.

“WFMs are a once-in-a-generation opportunity — similar to the rise of LLMs in 2017–2020.The teams that build the first scalable world models will define the foundation of the next AI wave: Physical AIs. With our distributed multi-camera network, NATIX has a clear advantage of being able to move faster than large OEMs.” - Alireza Ghods, NATIX CEO and co-founder

According to Valeo, autonomous machines operating in the physical world must learn to understand a 4-dimensional environment, factoring space and time into their decision-making. 

By training on many synchronized camera views at once, the ValeoxNATIX WFM claims to provide more nuanced training data that offers more true edge cases; ultimately leading to safer autonomous vehicles.

“Since our creation in 2018, Valeo’s AI research center has been at the forefront of AI research in the automotive industry, especially in the fields of assisted and autonomous driving. Our goal has always been to advance mobility intelligence safely and responsibly. By combining Valeo’s generative world modeling research expertise with NATIX’s global multi-camera data, we are accelerating both the quality and the accessibility of next-generation end-to-end AI models, enabling the research community to build upon strong open models.” - Marc Vrecko, Valeo Brain Division CEO

This collaboration builds on Valeo's existing open source frameworks, which have mainly been trained on front-camera video:

• VaViM (Video Autoregressive Model)

• VaVAM (Video- Action Model)

NATIX claims it will bring more versatility to the existing training data, adding 100k hours of

multi-camera driving data (600K hours of video data) in 7 months, from real vehicles across the US, Europe, and Asia.

NATIX Global Coverage Surpasses 239M Kms

NATIX’s new collaboration marks another large scale development for the DePIN project, which has previously integrated with Tesla and Grab. 

According to the NATIX explorer, the DePIN project now provides coverage of over 239M kilometers of the global road network, powered by over 268,000 contributors in 171 countries.

Read More on SolanaFloor

Investors are staking $SOL like never before

Solana Staking Rate Hits 2-Year High as Marinade Finance Continues to Grow Institutional Staking Service

$SKR is Here!