Li Auto Inc. ( LI ) shares are trading marginally lower on Wednesday in the premarket session.

Chinese stocks may be under pressure after the country’s softer-than-expected second-quarter GDP growth. According to official data released on Monday, the economy expanded by 4.7%.

This growth rate, lower than the 5.1% predicted by analysts, reflects the slowest pace since the first quarter of 2023.

Meanwhile, Li Auto ( LI ) has reportedly established a specialized team focused on investing in comprehensive AI (artificial intelligence) technology, following in the footsteps of NIO Inc ( NIO ). .

Li Auto ( LI ) has recently formed a team dedicated to end-to-end large-model autonomous driving, comprising slightly more than 200 members, with additional support from members of other teams as needed, reported CnEV Post, citing a local media outlet.

Li Auto ( LI ) is actively expanding its computing power for training after opting for the end-to-end solution. The company views supercomputing centers as the next competitive frontier in smart driving.

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Last year, Li Auto ( LI ) procured over 300 Nvidia servers from Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud service platform. Additionally, the company is collaborating with cloud service providers such as Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Cloud.

Following Nio’s precedent, which established a department focused on end-to-end large models, Li Auto ( LI ) is not the only company taking such organizational steps.

Li Auto ( LI ) has divided its smart driving team into two primary groups: one focused on algorithm development and the other on mass production development, totaling approximately 800 team members.

Li Xiang, founder, chairman, and CEO of Li Auto ( LI ), announced plans to launch an end-to-end +VLM (Vision-Language Model) autonomous driving solution by the end of this year or early next year.

This system will be trained using over 10 million clips.

Tesla, Inc ( TSLA ). achieved promising results with its FSD V12 release earlier this year, solidifying industry consensus around Tesla’s use of end-to-end large AI models. This has prompted more Chinese car companies to explore similar approaches.

Price Action: LI shares are trading lower by 1.44% to $20.60 premarket at last check Wednesday.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Image via Shutterstock

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