Cruise, GM’s self-driving car unit, acquires Zippy | Hacker News Reader

Cruise, GM’s self-driving car unit, acquires Zippy

techcrunch.com

78 pointspaulashbourne14 comments

It's a decent talent grab: Gabe Sibley of Zippy is a world-class state-estimation guy, formerly at Zoox, a SV self-driving startup, a professor at U Colorado at Boulder, postdoc with Newman's robot/driving group at Oxford, CS PhD @ USC.

A 4-year old video of academic-mode Sibley on autonomous navigation https://vimeo.com/88273779

(I'm not Sibley and have no conflict of interest: just work in related areas).

Thanks for the video link, that was a great watch.

You seem to know a lot about him...

You probably know the bios of interesting people in your area too, right?

As a middle-aged CS/AI prof I know the outline bios of hundreds of people thanks to having worked at a bunch of places and written a bazillion paper, grant, promotion and tenure reviews.

I think we're going to continue to see news like this until there exists parity in capabilities between the competitors (and then it'll be even more abundantly clear how far away we are from full-auto driving).

I don't think so at all. There is going to be big winners and big losers.

Once you have an automative technology that just works it is going to be licensed by third parties rather than replicated. That means consolidation to one or two big players who will take the 95% and leave the rest fighting over scraps.

I expect automation (whether full autonomy or just the assistive driving capabilities that we'll have for a fairly long time) will shake up the landscape and perhaps lead to consolidation. But automation isn't going to be some magic cube that gets stuck in every vehicle any more than it is today. I suppose you can posit a world in which there is some open source software and data set that everyone has to use for regulatory reasons but there's not a lot of evidence things are developing in that direction.

If I had to guess, there would be a lot of pushback before private companies back down and let regulators bully them into releasing their private source code and data.

With every major car company currently working on some form of autonomous driving either in-house or via partnerships, I don't see how a "winner" will end up being licensed by the others. It's just too much of a loss of control.

Even in this very late stage of autonomous vehicle development, it is still very unclear who the winners are. I don't see this dynamic changing any time soon, even if the technology 10x's its metrics.

>Even in this very late stage of autonomous vehicle development, it is still very unclear who the winners are.

IMO, one of the reasons it's unclear is that we're in fact in a pretty early stage of development at least relative to an end-game of widespread door-to-door without a human present. I do expect there are probably going to be a lot of different systems out there.

I am an engineer at Cruise. Our team is surprisingly weak. Particularly the early engineers (Rusty, Elliot, Juan, etc.) What we really need is better technical management to point the team in the right direction.

Are you making particular colleagues of yours who you think are bad?

We're building the wrong thing here at Cruise. The problem is partly that incompetent engineers are influential within the organization. The team is much weaker than outsiders believe and we're lacking competent big-picture technical direction.

It's acquisitions all the way down!

Yow! Are we having fun yet?

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