42dot headquarters in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province. (42dot) Hyundai Motor Group has hired former Nvidia autonomous driving expert Lee Hee-seok to its software research unit 42dot, amid the South Korean automaker’s push to strengthen its software-defined vehicles and self-driving technology capabilities.According to industry sources Tuesday, 42dot appointed Lee, an expert in computer vision technology, as vice president to lead research on vision-language action models.This marks the first time an executive has been brought in from outside the company since Park Min-woo took office in January as chief executive of 42dot and head of the group’s Advanced Vehicle Platform division.Lee is an autonomous driving and computer vision expert who previously worked at Qualcomm, Nvidia and most recently Woowa Brothers, the operator of Korea’s delivery platform Baemin.At Qualcomm, Lee spent eight years from 2013 helping to develop a camera perception system for autonomous driving, according to his LinkedIn page. He joined Nvidia in 2021, where he worked on deep learning-based camera and radar perception module development for autonomous driving. At Woowa Brothers, Lee led perception system development for self-driving delivery robots.CEO Park also worked at Nvidia before joining Hyundai Motor Group, and industry observers view Lee’s recruitment as part of the group’s broader push to internalize key autonomous driving technologies and secure global AI talent.Park said Lee played an important role in building and leading a strong engineering group within Nvidia's autonomous vehicle team in Korea.“It is truly great to have him join my team again in a new environment. I am excited to work with him once more as we continue building world-class autonomous driving and Physical AI capabilities at 42dot,” Park said on his LinkedIn.At 42dot, Lee is expected to focus on leading the development of next-generation VLA models, while playing a key part in advancing Hyundai Motor Group’s autonomous driving initiative, Atria AI.VLA models are AI systems designed to help physical AI platforms such as autonomous vehicles and robots interpret visual information from cameras, understand language-based context and translate those inputs and execute them into tasks.