GenAI Meets Autonomy: Yang Zhang on Open Source, Collaboration, and the Future of AutoCore.ai

I sat down with Yang Zhang — Founder and CEO of AutoCore.ai, Co-founder and Chairman of the Autoware Foundation, and a former senior leader at NVIDIA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We discussed his journey from shaping global hardware standards and building open-source ecosystems to driving GenAI-powered innovation at AutoCore.ai. Yang shared his perspective on GenAI as both an assistant and a driver, enabling 5–10x efficiency gains while still requiring deep human expertise for the final stretch. We explored the realities behind the hype, the importance of domain-specific integration, and how open collaboration through the Autoware Foundation is shaping the mobility ecosystem. The conversation closed with Yang’s vision of GenAI as a true co-pilot for engineers and a force that could democratise the development of autonomous systems in the years ahead.