Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
During the interview I asked my interviewer about Starsky's long-term prospects, and he said that they would have near doubled in size come summer. Lol
Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it may be closer to the truth than anyone wants to hear).
Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the LTE network where the truck happened to be at that moment was having a hiccup.
It's much worse than a cargo drone that might have a 12-14 satellite GPS+GLONASS lock, that could be programmed to stop and hover in place, or retrace its flight path breadcrumb style back to base in the event of brief loss of WAN network connectivity. It's something with possibly 20,000 kilograms of mass moving at 70 mph with live humans in traffic all around it, and a lot of inertia.
It's an external technical problem that the company itself can't solve, because they're not in control of LTE/5G network operators, they don't make LTE radios/modems/antennas, etc. The only places that I'm aware of using fully remote driven trucks are giant open pit mines in western Australia, where the mining company fully owns and operates in-house the network linking the trucks.
I personally know very little about self driving technology, but working in network engineering, the idea of relying upon the normal publicly-accessible nationwide LTE network operators for something that could be a life-critical safety function really scares me. Even with a max-priority service like Firstnet on ATT it would be sketchy.
Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%, and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error rate will be (0.1% * connection reliability) + (2% * (1 - connection reliability)). For 3-nines reliability, which is pretty poor, the error rate will be about 0.102%. For 4-nines it will be 0.1002%.
Those sorts of figures would effectively pay for themselves in terms of safety, once you factor in the benefits for monitoring and work conditions for a desk-operator vs a physically present driver, and they don't require either a particularly reliable connection or a particularly good backup AI.
Let's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!
† ...which doesn’t actually imply anything to do with Machine Learning. Your computer downclocking when it overheats rather than catching on fire, is an example of “subsumptive-architecture artificial intelligence”, even though it’s a hand-coded algorithm doing the subsumption. The “artificial intelligence” in this case refers to the emergent property of the layered subsumptive processes, not to the processes themselves.
There's several things that could be done in the city if it experiences drop outs. A creep mode where it moves quite slowly till the network improves would let the lower bandwidth or latency connection still be used safely.
Personally I always thought the answer would be self driving on highways to cargo hubs for delivery by human drivers. Or maybe self driving trucks with sleepers so if it got into a confusing situation it could stop/pull over and wake the driver to deal with it and allow the driver to sleep while the truck keeps moving.
How would it predict that these situations are coming with enough time to hand off to a human driver? I think it would need some form of crowd sourced or externally gathered data. The truck itself couldn't gather this in time.
>A creep mode where it moves quite slowly till the network improves would let the lower bandwidth or latency connection still be used safely.
Sounds like a traffic nightmare.
>Personally I always thought the answer would be self driving on highways to cargo hubs for delivery by human drivers
I do agree with this. I firmly believe that full self driving will probably never be possible for anything except for Interstate/main highways that are well maintained and very standardized in their construction, markings, etc.
Trucks are already really slow compared to traffic inside cities and in the rare cases where they're in this mode on a highway they're probably already in a slow traffic area because they're dealing with construction or accident areas.
1: https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotic...
Unsure if it was ever 54, but they definitely were aggressive in hiring (job postings also kind of reflected that).
But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year (Plus.ai is pretty much the biggest thing I can think of right now and maybe Ike in the trucking space).
Really interesting to see how everything in the AV space plays out: Deepscale/Drive.ai were both aquihires, Cruise/Torc/Argo/Aurora were bought out mostly, and the others are either just starting (Ghost and Voyage) or doing something that aids them (Renovo).
So essentially: either you're bought out by an OEM or funded by VCs hoping to get acquired (I don't think you can surivive in this space without being bought out or aquihired).
Disclaimer: I worked at Renovo.
1. Ousted one of their CEOs the day they got funding (something dirty like this)
2. Making their own car (which I guess isn't too far fetched, but Cruise seems to be much further along even though they did the whole thing in secrecy)
> But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year
Per the article:
> The company was the first to complete a fully unmanned truck trip on a 9.4-mile stretch of public highway and claims to have set a speed record for an unmanned truck, reaching 55 mph, in June 2019.
I'll admit that their telepresence human driver isn't ideal for self-driving vehicles. Its strategic merits, and product merits are very arguable. But it does follow a familiar model in automation progression, and I'd imagine that quite a few investors would have been interested. Likely just came down to timing and potentially valuation or other details. Can really hurt when an investor pulls back at the last minute.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013700 for a take on that from baremetrics founder.
The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates, in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy.
- Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy, when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP)
- Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a cheaper resource from abroad once they've "proven" that they "couldn't get any local talent"
- Company publishes non-urgent offer, in the hope to fish for resumes, and/or waits for years for the "perfect" talent to knock on their door
- Company forgot to take down vacancy, someone got hired 3 months ago
But of course, they didn't start doing it like that because they had a huge workforce already trained on their own process and the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I'm not sure how I would actually exploit a rival's meeting minutes even if I had them and no scruples.
1) what kind of hits they get (e.g. lots of over- or under-qualified)
2) what the salary requirements are relative to the hits they get
3) how effective are the ads in terms of writing, conveying what is on the table without saying too much, etc.
4) to make the company look busy / growing / large
5) to stay ahead of the churn, since they're large enough that they may need bodies in a few months (e.g. a poor performer is on the way out / gettin the axe, or a contract is up in 3 months) so they can get a couple of prospects on the hook and do a slow negotiation until they're ready to hire, in which case they make an offer at or near market rates
It's a really bad move. It looks very bad to companies who might be seeking investment, and could get a VC a name for causing issues in deals, so they only do it when they really need to. It typically means the company closes down as most companies raise when they have ~months of runway left, and raising a new round would take too long in most cases.
I find this statement pretty disingenuous when Waymo is trying to tackle the part of the problem Starsky isn't able to solve with their own self-driving tech - driving without a human in the loop for the last mile.