Nvidia will provide the USPS with AI tech to boost efficiency

In brief: The USPS is the world’s largest postal service, processing and delivering more than 146 billion pieces of mail annually. It’s no surprise, then, that packages can sometimes get misrouted or lost along the way. With Nvidia’s help, however, the error rate should fall considerably.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) on Tuesday announced plans to adopt artificial intelligence technology from Nvidia to provide a much-needed boost in efficiency.

Nvidia will use servers powered by its V100 Tensor Core GPUs and deep learning software to train multiple AI algorithms. Once fit for the job, the models will be deployed to Nvidia EGX edge computing systems housed at nearly 200 postal service facilities across the country.

Engineering teams from Nvidia and the USPS have been working together for several months now and plan to deploy the first system by the end of the year. It’ll be operational by the spring of 2020, we’re told, and should be able to process package data 10 times faster and with a higher degree of accuracy.

The systems are being purchased by the USPS “under contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”

The USPS has been increasingly turning to technology to modernize its service. Earlier this year, the company awarded a contract to global self-driving trucking company TuSimple to conduct a pilot to gauge the viability of adding self-driving transport trucks to its operations.

Masthead credit: USPS mail box by David Tran Photo