GM taps AI to help match speed of Chinese rivals

General Motors wants to slash the time it takes to develop a new vehicle in half, betting that artificial intelligence can help it compete with China's much faster automakers.Why it matters: Chinese carmakers have a formidable speed advantage, allowing them to introduce new models and technologies faster than their Western rivals can respond.The big picture: GM chief product officer Sterling Anderson acknowledges that Chinese automakers benefit from a deeply integrated supplier ecosystem that allows them to source common components quickly and efficiently.Western automakers lack that advantage, he told Axios.But he said GM has other advantages, including decades of accumulated engineering and manufacturing data it can leverage to accelerate development.GM aims to leverage that data to shrink its traditional four-to-five-year vehicle development cycle to roughly two years by using AI and virtual engineering to streamline design, testing and manufacturing.How it works: GM is using AI to replace what Anderson describes as slow, sequential engineering processes with faster, parallel development and virtual testing.For example, engineers were able to evaluate more than 300,000 designs …

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