LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.— Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang already lets his Tesla drive him much of the way to work on its own. But he predicts such vehicles will get much smarter in a hurry.

His company, whose chips are used to power autonomous driving and other artificial-intelligence applications, is just one player pushing the pace, Mr. Huang said Tuesday during an appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive 2016 global technology conference. The bigger factor is the race by just about every company that makes software to exploit what are called AI techniques in cars and other everyday devices, he said.

That means, once such technology is deployed in something like a smartcar, the software is continually updated over time based on data from all the cars on the road.

“The software becomes better and better,” Mr. Huang said.

As a result of the software race, and chips like Nvidia’s, the benefits are going to move much more quickly than the rate at which gains in conventional microprocessors accelerated innovation in industry’s like personal computers—a pace of innovation named after Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore.