The long road toward safe, viable self-driving vehicles has been a bumpy one, with autonomous passenger cars hitting potholes amid high-profile accidents and regulatory scrutiny. But in an ironic twist, it is the trucking industry that may ultimately cross the finish line first by delivering the first truly driverless vehicles at scale.

Leading that charge is Waabi, a Toronto-based startup that just raised $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B round to bring its vision of generative AI-powered autonomous trucks to reality. With over $280 million in total funding from a who's who of technology luminaries and transportation giants, Waabi is steering toward an ambitious 2024 target to deploy fully driverless semi-trucks across Texas.

At the heart of Waabi's bold autonomous driving solution is a fundamentally new approach leveraging breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence - the same transformative technology underpinning AI marvels like ChatGPT. By applying generative AI models to understand the physical world, Waabi has developed "Copilot4D," an end-to-end system capable of what CEO Raquel Urtasun calls "human-like reasoning" to safely navigate any scenario a truck could encounter on public roads.

"I've spent most of my career dedicated to inventing new AI technologies that can deliver on AI's full potential in the real world, in a provably safe and scalable way," said Urtasun, who pioneered the novel solution as a professor at the University of Toronto before founding Waabi. "Over the past three years, we've turned these breakthroughs into a revolutionary product that has far surpassed my expectations."

Unlike conventional autonomous driving systems that require vast troves of training data from extensive real-world testing, Waabi's generative AI models can "imagine" and reason through potential scenarios much like the human brain. This allows Copilot4D to generalize its driving intelligence to any situation - including ones it has never directly encountered before.

By reducing the need for an autonomous fleet to physically log millions of training miles, Waabi asserts its AI driver requires far less data, computing power, and costly real-world testing to achieve robust and scalable self-driving capabilities. The system is designed as a coherent, interpretable, and verifiable model that can rationalize its "thinking" in a manner akin to human drivers.

"Waabi is pioneering generative AI for the physical world, and their AI-first approach provides a solution that is extremely exciting in both its scalability and capital efficiency," said Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber which co-led Waabi's latest funding round alongside Khosla Ventures.

That scalable, cost-effective pathway could be the key selling point that finally makes commercial driverless trucking a reality after years of fitful progress. Several logistics giants have already partnered with Waabi, including a collaboration with Uber Freight for ongoing autonomous shipments of commercial goods across Texas using Waabi's self-driving truck prototypes.

"Raquel is a visionary in autonomous driving, and under her leadership Waabi's breakthrough AI technology could revolutionize transportation toward a safer and more sustainable future," added NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose company's chips power Waabi's autonomous trucks. Nvidia and other tech titans like Volvo and Porsche were among the high-profile investors in Waabi's latest mega-round.

For Waabi and its visionary generative AI approach, that sustainable future centered on fully driverless trucking may be just one years-long haul away. If the startup can truly deliver Level 4 autonomy at a commercially viable scale in 2024 as promised, it could mark a pivotal turning point - the moment when self-driving ambitions transcend sci-fi fantasies to reshape the $700 billion trucking industry itself.