Wayve, a self-driving technology company and a Virgin Group investment, has introduced a first-of-its-kind AI model for self-driving, called LINGO-1. The company is pioneering the use of natural language to help people more easily understand the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of its AI Driver technology.

The LINGO-1 model is an open-loop driving commentator that combines vision, language and action to enhance how Wayve can interpret, explain and train the foundation driving models. The model can comment on driving scenes and be prompted with questions to clarify and explain what factors in the driving environment affected its driving decisions. It will also help people to more easily understand the decision-making capabilities of the technology. As Wayve’s CEO, Alex Kendall, said: “We see it [LINGO] as a beachhead piece of research that opens up a wealth of new opportunities, particularly in AI safety and transparency, because we can now directly ask the system why it's doing what it’s doing.”