Turing Selected for Phase 3 of Japan’s GENIAC Program for Generative AI DevelopmentDeveloping an In-Vehicle Physical Foundation Model for Fully Autonomous Driving

Turing Inc. (Headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo; CEO: Issei Yamamoto, hereinafter “Turing”) is pleased to announce that they have been selected for Phase 3 of the “GENIAC” program, a national initiative led by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to strengthen domestic generative AI development capabilities.

With this selection, Turing will receive government support for initiatives involving GPU-based computing resources and dataset construction. These efforts will accelerate the company’s development of an in-vehicle physical foundation model for fully autonomous driving.

This marks Turing’s third selection under the GENIAC program, following their inclusion in Phase 1 (announced in February 2024) and Phase 2 (announced in October 2024).

Phase 3 selection results can be found here: https://www.nedo.go.jp/koubo/CD3_100397.html

About the Project

In this project, Turing will develop a physical foundation model that operates in tandem with real vehicles, based on a multimodal AI capable of high-level understanding of text, video, sensor data, and control signals. The system will integrate a visual compression tokenizer and a 10-billion-parameter physical foundation model trained on large-scale datasets. These components will be distilled and compressed for seamless integration with in-vehicle systems.

During the development process, Turing leverages their proprietary visual data compression technology to convert images into sub-1KB tokens before entering them into the model. This will build a physical foundation model and supporting systems capable of unified inference and generation across vision, language, and action.

This approach allows for real-time, high-precision autonomous driving in standalone mode, even in rural or mountainous areas with unreliable network infrastructure. This will help resolve mobility challenges faced by elderly residents and people living in depopulated regions.

Looking ahead to the real-world deployment of fully autonomous driving systems, Turing plans to release portions of the foundational technologies developed through this project as reusable infrastructure applicable across multiple domains.

About GENIAC

The Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) is a national initiative jointly implemented by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to strengthen Japan’s generative AI development capabilities. They provide compute resources to support the development of foundation models (the core technology behind generative AI) and offer assistance for data utilization and demonstration studies related to AI applications.
URL:https://www.meti.go.jp/policy/mono_info_service/geniac/index.html

About Turing

Turing is a Japan-based startup developing fully autonomous driving systems. Their End-to-End architecture allows AI to make all driving decisions based solely on camera input.

Turing’s innovations include:

• Heron: a multimodal generative AI capable of high-level decision-making that can use multiple data types,
• Terra: a generative world model that produces realistic driving scenarios as video,
• CoVLA Dataset: a VLA model dataset that provides natural language-based understanding and route planning from visual inputs.

Company Overview

Company Name: Turing Inc.
Headquarters: East Tower 4F, Gate City Ohsaki, 1-11-2 Osaki, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo
CEO: Issei Yamamoto
Founded: August 2021
Business: Development of fully autonomous driving technologies
URL: https://tur.ing/

Careers

Turing is hiring individuals passionate about transforming the world through fully autonomous driving technologies developed in Japan. Please visit our careers page to learn more. We also host regular events such as open office sessions and Tech Talks.

Upcoming Events

・Tuesday, July 15, 2025 | 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM (JST)
Turing Tech Talk #25
Design and Operation for Large-Scale Processing
https://turing.connpass.com/event/361118/

・Tuesday, July 22, 2025 | 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM (JST)
Turing Tech Talk #26
The Vision System Behind E2E Autonomous Driving: A Deep Dive into the Camera Processing Pipeline
https://turing.connpass.com/event/362593/

Media Contact

PR Representative (Abe): pr@turing-motors.com