Automotive Engineering - February 2025 - 4

EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Sebastian Blanco
Editor-in-Chief
sebastian.blanco@saemediagroup.com
Recuperating from AI-induced CES fatigue
Listening to some end-of-the-year music
shows recently, I was reminded of
how natural it is to get jaded about
things, even things we truly enjoy, as we
get older. The critics I listened to didn't
start covering music because they had
an indifference to beats and melodies.
No, they loved (and love) listening to
music until it fills the room. It's just that
after a decade of putting out annual
Top Ten lists, the shine has dulled.
I bring this up after a busy week in
Las Vegas for the large and growing
CES tech show last month. I'm still a
relative CES newbie, only
attending four or five
times, but they were not
consecutive and with the
pandemic messing up my
sense of time, it feels like
I've been going for ages.
This year was, as you
may have seen, the year of
AI. CES' own promotional
material proclaimed that
the " global technology
supercycle of AI is here "
and as a media attendee, I was the
lucky recipient of more suspicious AIrelated
PR pitches than I would have
thought possible. No, I do not need an
AI spice rack, thank you very much.
I'm much more in the Cory Doctorow
camp when it comes to AI. Tech writer
Doctorow calls the AI bubble the new
crypto bubble, and said that " the same
people are ... doing the same thing with
AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately
to find a use case to cram it
into, despite the yawning indifference
and outright hostility of the users. "
Part of my AI hesitancy is because
I'm still trying to wrap my head around
As you can
tell from the
pages that
follow, we
were not
enraptured by
the AI hype at
CES this year.
just how it's all supposed to work. Over
here, in the general tech press, I read
articles explaining why large language
models (LLMs) and large multimodal
models (LMMs) will always be susceptible
to at least some minor hallucinations.
Then, over and over again at CES,
I hear how AI will change this or that
part of the auto industry. One company
told me that they rely on an AI in their
simulation-based battery development,
but acknowleged that the tool they're
relying on may suggest hallucinations
as solutions. That feels problematic.
Other announcements,
like BMW and Honda
showing off generative
AI-powered assistants for
their respective infotainment
systems, were easier
to wish well, and NVIDIA
said at its press conference
that it would focus
its barrage of new AI
models at solving two
main problems: autonomous
driving and robotics.
As you can tell from the pages that
follow, we were not enraptured by the
AI hype at CES this year. We report on
it when appropriate, but we knew there
was more to CES this year to let it dominate
our coverage. We're all eager to
see what positive changes AI can bring
to our industry, but before that happens
we've got to see the AI hype over
through to a more stable end. Some of
that ride will create legitimately cool
technology what will, yes, solve some
of humanity's problems. But a lot of it, if
CES 2025 was anything to go on, will
be eminently ignorable.
Sebastian Blanco, Editor-in-Chief
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4 February 2025
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
Automotive Engineering - February 2025

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