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Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

Uber is way way far out of their league here.

Imagine being a software and services company trying to build one of the most mechanically and electronically complex items that humans have ever built with a team that has only built prototypes and not having the war chest of continuing positive cash flow to fund development.

Not even looking at the strategy of it all, this program sounds like it needs to be dumped in favor of partnerships.

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> with a team that has only built prototypes

This is normal for research isn't it? If someone before you has already built a working version of something, then it isn't research any more. And Uber hires extraordinarily qualified AI researchers doesn't it?

I think what they're saying is that usually teams don't go that far out of their industrial strength. In a way, Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware, which is a big shift. Shipping hardware past the prototype phase is __HARD__ in ways that shipping a software app/building a marketplace isn't (not saying the latter aren't hard, but the two tasks take very different types of organizations).

Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware

But why would they do that, instead of hiring other developers? Surely Levandowski would have an idea of who to hire.

Reasarchers aren't normally expected to build a production system to sell as a product. They might be very smart people but for something like this you need a team with at least some members who have real experience delivering automotive hardware + safety critical systens + automation.

Research tends to ignore the boring but important details that make a product.

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