How this makes sense for Uber is that they don’t want to be left out when robotaxis replace human-driven ride hailing vehicles.
They killed someone.
That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business.
Their self driving car division was, by the accounts I read, never going to achieve self-driving and had serious problems.
If being a visionary means you are okay with killing people, then fuck being a visionary. “Moving fast and breaking things” should NEVER include killing people.
Which line of business would that be? Maybe the one involving human drivers that leads to ~75 deaths per year [1]? Though that's still a lower-than-average death rate compared to the general population (so shutting it down without a replacement could cause even more deaths).
You could argue that Uber has a moral imperative to replace its human drivers with automation as soon as possible.
[1] https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?...
Just a guess but if that’s accurate and then waymo expands to where it becomes the de facto option and familiar for a large number of ride hailers you can rest assured the next step will be to take back operations and cut Uber out
GCP was not a strong competitor (in our eyes) when the on-prem decision was being made in the 2011-2013 timeframe, which was also before there was even an Autonomous program. The reason early infra was on-prem largely boiled down to a general distrust for the cloud from the Boss, who in my recollection had had some bad experiences with other portfolio companies suffering major downtime due to AWS outages.
Uber’s relationship with Google was great until that little legal matter. They were huge and very helpful investors in Uber.
It got axed during the layoffs in 2020-21.
Alumni of Michelangelo and the Self Driving Teams founded a lot of the AI startups you hear about today.
Furthermore, Uber's self-driving program was started when an ex-Goog exec stole Waymo IP when he joined Uber.