We are living in transformative times—due, in part, to the renaissance of artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning and the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Transportation is one industry that AI may soon change dramatically.

New research presented at the recent 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems shows how a conversational AI based on an LLM framework called Talk2Drive can interpret human commands to guide autonomous vehicles (AVs). “This is the first-of-its-kind multi-scenario field experiment that deploys LLMs on a real-world autonomous vehicle,” wrote corresponding author Can Cui along with co-authors Ziran Wang, Zichong Yang, Yupeng Zhou, Yunsheng Ma, Juanwu Lu, Lingxi Li, Yaobin Chen, and Jitesh Panchal, all of Purdue University.

The concept of AI-powered talking cars was a television fantasy a little over 42 years ago. An AI-powered talking car called K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand) was the fictional main character of a TV series, "Knight Rider," that ran for four seasons on NBC. KITT was a chatty 1982 Pontiac Trans Am two-door coupe that costarred alongside David Hasselhoff, which helped launch his human co-star into global fame and stardom.

But KITT’s talking........

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