Anthony Levandowski, self driving car whiz who fell from grace
wired.com
wired.com
> Indeed, that summer, Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed.
I made a rule for myself that once I find out for sure that a person is an asshole, I will cut all my ties to that person. (Fool me once etc.) Apparently Silicon Valley does not have a similar rule.
That requires a special kind of attitude.
So does this mean Waymo owes Uber damages, or payment for taking the problem off their hands?
Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.
It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.
I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.
Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.
I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.
Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.
When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.
The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.
I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?
but if you assume it's accurate, you've really got to wonder who's driving the bus. A few months ago it's "let's make this guy rich if this succeeds" and letting him start businesses on the side, and then all of a sudden it's the opposite. It would almost make one think that, maybe, everyone isn't so great at assessing impact and contribution of an individual. And if that's the case, maybe everyone should slow the roll on the whole fetishization of engineers/visionaries that's such a favorite pastime in the valley?
This entire story is mind-boggling.
While Levandowski repeatedly bit the hand that fed him, they continued to feed him.
Levandowski comes out of this fine. Google can't sue him. Google has an employee contract which forces employee disputes into arbitration. That arbitration has already happened and can't be reopened. The settlement terms are not public.
The LIDAR design is a side issue. There will be lots of good, low-cost LIDAR units as soon as someone is able to order a few hundred thousand of them. Continental's flash LIDAR will probably be the first successful mass-market flash LIDAR. Quanergy made a lot of noise, but never shipped. Now they seem to be pivoting from automotive to border security. (They want to make Trump's border wall a virtual one.) Tetraview has funding but no products. Velodyne has been making flash LIDAR noises but hasn't demoed yet. Innoviz has demoed an experimental unit and claims to be selling it. Meanwhile, Velodyne is trying to get their rotating devices down to $500 in quantity.
Same concept as TV remotes that frequently use a 36-38 kHz carrier. If they just gated the IR LED on and off at the baseband data rate, interference from room light would be a problem.
That's fine for a scanner, where you only need one copy of the electronics, but doing it for every pixel means something like a radio receiver behind each pixel. Still, you could probably do that now.
The SwissRanger [1], a short-range time of flight imaging camera, worked like that. It's been discontinued.
(I fooled around with this in the early 1990s, trying to build a laser scanner. Too many noise problems.)
I'm sure this is strictly on the up-and-up, but in the 70's this was a classic tax dodge that many folks tried. The problem was if you got caught in any inconsistencies where, for some purposes, you seemed to be acting as a regular business while representing yourself as a church to the govt.
> Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation.
Is this true? All churches must make their IRS returns available?
And for this reason it's incredibly difficult to get tax-free status after the whole "new religion" movement in the 1970s. The bar the IRS sets is far higher now. Which is why this is very likely not the motivation here... any lawyer would tell you this and I'm sure this guy has plenty of lawyers.
Churches still have it pretty easy, they are excepted from having to file for tax exempt status, don't have to file an annual information return. They are not required to obtain 501(c)(3) status.
Legitimate churches, that is. The IRS is free to question your status as a church but is unlikely to if, for instance, you are part of a recognized national church organization, or otherwise function as a regular church.
Anyway, always interesting to hold Heinlein's writing up to contemporary society. Or rather, to have comparisons spontaneously appear in one's thinking as one surveys circumstances.
https://everything2.com/title/The+Heinlein+-+Hubbard+Wager+M...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...
As a side note, 508(c)(1)(a) can also speak about politics while 501(c)(3) are forbidden from doing so.
Er, that's not exactly true. 501(c)(3) aren't forbidden from speaking about politics. There are restrictions on the ways in which they can (e.g. no overt party affiliation) and the degree to which they can do so. For example, they can spend time lobbying, but only 10% of their time and only 10% of their budget (I don't remember if it's still 10%, but that used to be the number). Oftentimes, 501(c)(3)s will have a separate, associated entity that they use for their political lobbying, to avoid having to keep track of their resources when mixed and prove that it's under this threshold.
508 doesn't provide an alternative kind of tax exempt organization, it identifies rules governing 501(c)(3), and 508(c) identifies exceptions to the rules governing which 501(c)(3) orgs are presumed to be “private foundations” unless they notify the Treasury otherwise. All organizations described by the exception in 508(c)(1)(a) are, by definition, organizations also described in 501(c)(3), and so governed by the rules applicable to such organizations.
They have to file papers, not publish tax returns
Is this SV religion on twitter that thinks the blockchain is actually a sentient AI attempting to infiltrate the global banking system?
Is there any company in the self-driving realm that he isn't deeply connected to?
I wonder how on earth that pivot happened.
http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge05/Team_Applicants/Te...
Basically, the founder of Velodyne (subwoofers), David Hall, got interested in robotics (from what sounds like the hobby angle, via combat robotics).
They went from mason jars -> aluminum cans for food -> aluminum cans for satellites.
"That owner was…Anthony Levandowski, who had cofounded 510 Systems with two fellow Berkeley researchers, Pierre-Yves Droz and Andrew Schultz, just weeks after starting work at Google....
"Google’s engineering team was initially unaware that 510 Systems was Levandowski’s company, several engineers told me. That changed once Levandowski proposed that Google also use the Topcon box for its small fleet of aerial mapping planes. “When we found out, it raised a bunch of eyebrows,” remembers an engineer. Regardless, Google kept buying 510’s boxes."
Raising eyebrows? Starting a company to design products to sell to your employer through a third party would raise more than eyebrows for most of the people who tried it.
[Edit]
"In early 2011, that plan was to bring 510 Systems into the Googleplex. The startup’s engineers had long complained that they did not have equity in the growing company. When matters came to a head, Levandowski drew up a plan that would reserve the first $20 million of any acquisition for 510’s founders and split the remainder among the staff, according to two former 510 employees. “They said we were going to sell for hundreds of millions,” remembers one engineer. “I was pretty thrilled with the numbers.”
"Indeed, that summer, Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed. “I regret how it was handled…Some people did get the short end of the stick,” admitted Levandowski in 2016. The buyout also caused resentment among engineers at Google, who wondered how Levandowski could have made such a profit from his employer."
Yep. I guess this is another Silicon Valley success story.
My employer fired someone for that just last month.
Burn in hades dude. You've got the money, if you actually regret it pay out
Wow. That is some really evil shit there. Maybe Levandowski is the reason they dropped the "Don't be evil" motto.
It's unclear how much of the after tax $100m of the Google payout he spent building up Otto. They did have 90 or so employees, and probably other fairly big spending, though not for that long.
Perhaps rich, but I suspect much less so than he would have been had he stayed put.
I thought I heard he had a $100m bonus from Google at some point. Then he sold Otto later to Uber for $600m+?
After all the mess, what's he left with?
"With the purchase of 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, his salary, and bonuses, Levandowski earned at least $120 million from his time at Google."
I wonder if he spent some of that on Otto. They had 91 employees at the end, and I assume some of amount of capital equipment.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=levandowski%20arbitration&sort...
It's still not a great title in the misleading+bait department (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but we prefer to use language from the article itself wherever possible. If you or anyone can suggest a better—more accurate and neutral—title, we can change it again.
And, when the stakes are high, there’s no room to play loose and fast with IP.
On the Board of Directors level, this kind of thing happens all the time.
This is a ridiculous question. Any organization may include untrustworthy people (cf. Volkswagen emissions scandal) but that does not make their products unsafe, necessarily.
I'm not sure that was the best example for your point, the few untrustworthy people in Volkswagen did cause cars to not work as advertised. That's an example for not trusting any of their products anymore.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
They won't be killed by the cars physically running them over or otherwise going out of control, true, but that's because the untrustworthy people chose to be untrustworthy in emissions standards and not in handling or self-driving algorithms or anything. You can't rely on them always making that choice, because they're untrustworthy.
I have no doubt that the extra pollution is doing health damage. I strongly want more air pollution regulation. I don't trust Volkswagen, and I had one of the super-polluter TDIs, and sold it back to VW.
But this claim of 1,200 premature deaths by up to a decade seems goofy. If VW's 2.6M cars in Germany alone were taking a decade off anyone's life, it seems like we'd all be dead already. The world has over a billion polluting motor vehicles, and we're not even talking about airplanes, fires, factories, natural sources of NOx, or energy production. Car emissions are a minority of the total.
For sure, lots of people are getting sick from pollution in Europe and globally, but I wish the authors had stuck with person-years of life rather than try to state it as a specific number of people affected. Whatever actually happens, assuming it was even possible to pinpoint VW, which it's not, the probability that number of people affected in Europe is near 1,200 is almost zero. So, I guess at least consider calling it what it is: someone's estimate.
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that the same kind of wilful dishonesty around monitoring cars' ability to choose the appropriate speed, direction or reaction in certain road situations wouldn't result in fatal accidents?
That's no reason to paint the entire company with a broad brush.
Very similar to the careers of a number hi paid bankers and traders I know.
That's not a description that will be particularly redeeming to a general audience, especially for readers who are cynical of tech's reach, and things like Zuckerberg becoming more political.
Not even an interesting one - just yet another rehash of 90s Extropian Cyborg-Christianity rapture of the nerds stuff.
Either you've skimmed it, or you have a very unusual concept of what "redeems" someone...
For me, that is the opposite of "redeeming".
Not really fond of Uber either, but the author could at least _try_ to sound impartial.