A meeting brought the two auto industry giants who were cooperating to court. One is a world-renowned automobile Tier1Valeo, the other is an autonomous driving chip giantNVIDIA. The reason for prosecution is still the most taboo among technology companies:Valeo accuses Nvidia of stealing trade secrets, and in the process of cooperation. What happened?
Valeo employee defected to Nvidia with over 6GB of files
Valeo and Nvidia are partners.
The two companies will jointly provide parking systems, including hardware and software, to a large automotive OEM.
In this cooperation,NVIDIAResponsible for providing parking software, andValeoOnly ultrasonic sensors are provided, which is the hardware.
When advancing the cooperation process, employees from both parties held video conferences based on the progress, mainly so that Nvidia employees could ask Valeo employees about the relevant data of the ultrasonic sensors to facilitate the adaptation of upper- and lower-layer software.
In one of the meetings, the NVIDIA employee responsible for the demonstration was also a senior perception engineer at NVIDIA.Mohammad MoniruzzamanShared his computer screen.
During the presentation, when Mohammed was shrinking the PPT, a Valeo employee suddenly discovered a file opened on Mohammed's computer. The content turned out to be Valeo's.internal source code!
The Valeo employee immediately took a screenshot and reported the incident to the company. Valeo directly sued Mohammed, and the police also launched an investigation into Mohammed.
During the investigation, the police discovered that Mohammed was once an employee of Valeo and was responsible for product software development. He only switched jobs to Nvidia a few months ago.
Before Mohammed left Valeo, he accessed Valeo’s internal systems through his personal account and downloaded tens of thousands of documents, forms, and6Gb code, which contains all the source code of Valeo’s self-developed intelligent driving and parking system.
Some of the documents were even printed out and placed at Mohammed's home, and some code, programs and files were found from the office computer Mohammed used at Nvidia.
This not only violates the IT rules and clauses signed in the Valeo employee contract and separation contract, but also violates the law.
On September 8 this year, Mohammed was convicted of illegally obtaining, using and disclosing Valeo’s trade secrets and was fined 14,400 euros (approximately 112,600 yuan).
But the matter is not over here. Valeo has now turned its finger on Nvidia and sued Nvidia.
The reason is that Valeo believes that,Nvidia profited from these trade secrets.
Is Nvidia profiting from Valeo's code?
Here is a brief introduction to the two companies.
ValeoFounded in 1923, it initially only manufactured auto parts, such as brakes, air conditioners, lighting systems, etc.
Later, through business expansion and overseas mergers, Valeo developed into a multinational giant Tier 1 and gradually formed today'sFour major business branches, including automotive comfort and driver assistance systems, powertrain systems, vehicle air conditioning systems and visual systems.
Among them, in the 1990s, Valeo began to develop a parking system using ultrasonic sensors, and also launched the most famous and common reversing buzzer today: the system reminds the driver of the distance of obstacles through the sound of the alarm.
And later, Valeo began to develop its own L2 and higher-level intelligent driving systems.
Now, Valeo can not only provide corresponding levels of intelligent driving software services, but Mercedes-Benz, BMW, General Motors, Didi, etc. are all partners.
At the same time, it can also provide all the sensors required by the system, including ultrasonic sensors, cameras, millimeter wave radar, lidar and sensor cleaning systems. The output has exceeded1.5 billion.
In other words, in the field of intelligent driving, Valeo hasmore than thirty yearsThe accumulation of experience, whether it is hardware or software, has become the industry leader.
And on the other sideNVIDIA, established in 1993, started out as a GPU (graphics processing unit) and has now developed into the world's number one chip supplier. Its business covers CPU, GPU and DPU, becoming the industry's first choice for high-performance computing.
NVIDIA's current business directions include gaming, visualization, data centers and autonomous driving, and it entered the autonomous driving business relatively late.
In 2015, Nvidia released its first autonomous driving computing platformNVIDIA DRIVE, providing a complete set of autonomous driving solutions for car companies and autonomous driving companies.
After several years of development, NVIDIA's DriveOrin series of chips have become the first choice for car companies, especially domestic car companies, when deploying smart driving on the car side.
But compared with its booming chip business, Nvidia’s autonomous driving software strength is not that outstanding.
This is also the point put forward by Valeo in the complaint: I have never heard of Nvidia developing any powerful autonomous driving software, especially the parking system, so why did it bid for this cooperation?
However, it is worth noting that Valeo also mentioned in the complaint that it had previously provided autonomous driving software and hardware to the OEM.
However, in this bidding, the OEM did not choose Valeo to continue to provide software services. Instead, it chose Nvidia, which it had not cooperated with before, leaving only the hardware part to Valeo.
As for the accusation that "Nvidia profited from Valeo's trade secrets," the indicted employee Mohammed said that Valeo's source code was only saved locally on his laptop and was not shared with other Nvidia employees.
But Valeo obviously does not believe this kind of rhetoric, arguing that if the code has been edited by employees and entered the system feedback loop, it is likely to have been merged into Nvidia's database.
Valeo believes that through this move, Nvidia can savemillions of dollarsdevelopment costs.
The defendant Nvidia did not publicly respond to the accusation, but stated in a letter sent to Valeo’s lawyers:
Nvidia has no interest in Valeo's code or its alleged trade secrets, have taken specific measures to protect their rights.
But it is undeniable that Valeo’s accusations will have a great impact on Nvidia, which is preparing to expand its autonomous driving software business.
Because of NVIDIA's current role in the field of smart cars, the core still requires more technology companies to make solutions based on their own chips. If it is finally proven that it will compete with the upstream cooperation for profits, and even peek into the other party's business secrets in cooperation with the partner...
NVIDIA's goodwill in the field of smart cars will cause a devastating blow.
Therefore, although the current lawsuit is still pending, for Nvidia, this is a lawsuit that it cannot lose and cannot afford to lose.