jayjay71

>Given that Uber bought CMU's self-driving car research department

This is a common misconception. Uber poached several engineers from NREC, which technically belongs to CMU, but for all practical purposes is an independent entity. And of their original ~40 engineers, not many had any real previous experience on self-driving cars. Almost all of the engineers from the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges had already left (many went to Google). NREC had nothing to do with any of those competitions.

So what happened to CMU's self-driving car research department? Well, initially it was funded by GM. But it spun off into a company called Ottomatika which was later acquired by Delphi.

Uber hired a bunch of great roboticists. They didn't hire a team that had any real experience with self-driving cars.

What do you think will be the use cases for the Hololens in the short and long term? I've yet to try it, but I've heard mostly good things.

A large part of why the original Skunk Works was so successful is because Kelly Johnson, and later Ben Rich, did not care about outward appearances. They had a job and they did it (and they made it profitable). Here's a great book on the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...

I don't know what happened internally. But if that happened internally and they weren't willing to announce it externally, that shows they are concerned with appearances. And if that didn't happen internally then they have a cultural issue where they are afraid to embrace failure and learn from it.

Obviously I have limited information and I am not trying to define X based on this one event. But I do think it says something about the culture there.

Owning up to mistakes is the fastest way to make progress. Waiting so long to admit that a project failed worries me. X is supposed to be a moonshot factory, where failures are celebrated and reality dictates that the majority of their undertakings will fail. To me, the delay is indicative of a culture more concerned with appearances than substance.

Maybe X had good reasons for staying quiet for so long, but unless they say why it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

I don't see it that way - the acquisition was public and there were articles on the project in the past.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2/8131145/googles-titan-drone...

I think what's sad is not that they shut down the project soon after acquiring Titan Aerospace, but that they kept it quiet for almost a year. That sort of PR practice makes me worry about their internal culture.

Edit: It concerns me because I wonder how many other projects they've announced and shut down without telling us, and what that must be like for the employees who are no doubt under NDA who are shuffled around and unable to talk about it. Imagine if your company were acquired by X, and then you get fired, and you can't even tell your friends or potential employers it's because X axed the project.

So long as the investors are here (and often times require you to move to get funded), the startups will be here.

> it's a brutally efficient market

I disagree. You're assuming that every startup gets funded. I think this is wrong. Just because there are lots of terrible startups that get funding, doesn't mean there aren't great startups that never get funded. I'm sure you're familiar with the story of how AirBnB wouldn't exist if it weren't for Y Combinator. Or how Y Combinator stopped operating out of Boston because DropBox couldn't get funded there.

I understand why VC is the way it is, and I think it's a big problem (unless you're Sequoia). Everybody is focused on derisking, which makes sense. But most take it too far, and look for external signalling and develop a herdlike mentality. There is absolutely an opportunity for investors to take on bigger risks with bigger upsides - that is part of Peter Thiel's strategy. And I think Marc Andreessen largely made a16z into what it is today by doing one thing extremely well - thinking for himself.

The rules for startup investing are very different for hardware than they are for software. And the world is looking for the next Apple. Who is going to fund it? I'll bet good money it's not Sequoia. I also bet Sequoia won't invest in the next big energy company, or the next big space company, or a company that wins a sizable market for self-driving cars. There are plenty of opportunities for a new VC to make money, you just need to think outside of the box.

Edit: Just wanted to add I think you make a lot of good points, but I think there is an opportunity for more great VCs to exist.

> let's not forget that it's at least 10x if not 100x harder to be a good VC than a good entrepreneur

Why do you say that?

I'm curious: when do you think a stage 3, 4, and 5 vehicle will be readily available on the market (specifically the United States)?

Neat! I stand corrected. I wonder if the map data they have all over the country/world/wherever is comparable to the cities they test their cars in. If so, that would be fantastic.

Some left to start their own companies, some went to Uber, and some haven't publicly stated yet. Everything I said is easy to verify via Google (there are articles written about it). The heavy hitters are Sebastian Thrun who left many years ago, so that's now really news; Chris Urmson, who was the face of the project, left about a year ago; Anthony Levandowski left to start his company (but really to join Uber since that was clearly the idea from the start) and took some people with him; and two of the lead software engineers started Nuro.ai

Why do you assume those other things are harder to detect? Computer vision is tough, and human detection is one of the most researched problems in the field. Uber's self-driving cars were running red lights not too long ago. And it's important to understand that a video is not a live demo.

If Google has an approach that works for them and it depends on the maps - that's fine. I'm just pointing out that they (probably) made a decision a long time ago that they are going to use those maps to further their self-driving technology. It's a design choice, with pros and cons, like any other decision.

Google Street View contains images, not point clouds. And based on my usage, it's updated roughly every year. This is not even close to sufficient for their self-driving cars.

> They even demoed it.

Sort of. "Quanergy has not yet demonstrated a version of the S3 that performs to the specifications that they announced at their press conference"

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...

Makani. They are trying to effectively change the energy industry using kites. It is ridiculously ambitious.

This information is not current, but I know that they used to detect traffic lights by looking for them in their maps. By that I mean they knew where the traffic light should be, then did the basic geometry to figure out where that is in their image, and then determined the color of the pixels to figure out what the light was saying. That absolutely would not work without the maps. I am willing to bet that their approach fundamentally depends on the maps. That's fine, it just means they can't work in areas that aren't already mapped (and you have to have one of the maps stored locally in the car, as those files are gigantic).

Time will tell, but I think the biggest red flag for Google/Waymo was how many senior personnel left the project in the last year. It wasn't just a few people - it was almost anybody that had been named in every previous press release, and many other people as well.

Enlighten me.

How do you think the new governments will unfold? Will there be gradual changes in multiple countries around the world, or will there be violent uprisings?

Historically speaking, at least in the United States, the citizens are far less powerful than the state simply due to the imbalance in weapons. The point of the 2nd amendment was so the people would be more powerful than the government, but due to the ban on machine guns and numerous other restrictions, I don't think anybody would argue the masses have nearly as much firepower as the military/police.

Exciting times ahead? I have to agree it feels like a change is coming, mostly due to the rapidly growing number of humans and dwindling of limited resources combined with growing inequality, but it's hard to predict what will happen (if anything) and when.

You think we'll see anything resembling a post-capitalist society in our lifetimes?

The DARPA Robotics Challenge was actually inspired by the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, because it was unsafe for any humans to go there and people were surprised that no robots were capable of going themselves. Of course, we still have a long way to go before robots are going to deliver on that front. I don't know enough about nuclear reactors to know what the safeguards are in the scenarios you describe, but I do think it's smart to ask about the worst-case scenario.

I agree, and that's great! But when a company sells a feature called Autopilot, and it's marketed as a car that drives itself, I have an issue when someone dies and the company spins bad statistics to defend its practice.

Incremental improvements that save lives and make driving better are fantastic. Overselling a feature that can kill people is not.

Autobraking is a great technology that has been around for a few years (BMW was selling it in 2013), but nobody touted it as a self-driving feature. My point isn't that working on this technology is bad, my point is people expect it to do more than it can.

I think self-driving cars have incredible potential, but the media hype is just too strong around this technology. People are used to startups going from 0 to unicorn in 5+ years, because they are often based on simple technologies and business models centered around exponential growth. AirBnB, Uber, twitch, and many more are all technology companies that obviously had many challenges, but they did not depend on a technological breakthrough in order to get where they are today.

There is a gap between Level 2 and Level 4 (arguably Level 5 with the new standards, but I'm going to assume Level 4 means what most people would call a true self-driving car) autonomy which is dangerous, because it lulls humans into a false sense of safety. And then when the car can no longer drive itself, the user is expected to take over with a delayed reaction time and little to no context in what could be a very dangerous situation. It is a deadly valley. There are numerous studies on this topic from the aviation industry, and drivers don't have nearly as much training as pilots.

I think real self-driving cars are awesome, and the first time I sat in one years ago when I worked on it as a PhD student was truly an incredible experience. But the hype around the technology is too much, and when investors push for a product in a few years when it's not ready at best companies will fail and at worst people will die. Misinforming the public on this is a very serious problem which nobody seems to care about, even after at least 1 death which is still under investigation.

I am all for working on this technology and seeing incremental improvements over the years. But I am frustrated with the media's portrayal of how it's just around the corner (I am frustrated with the media in general), and I believe the overpromise of the technology is largely responsible for the death of the Tesla owner in Florida last year (and there are other accidents that are reported in China which get much less coverage).

People will say self-driving cars save lives and are safer. In theory, yes - but the problem is we aren't there yet. There just isn't enough data to make that claim. When Tesla said it was safer, they ignored the fact that all of their driving was on highways (which are statistically safer) and that their owners are more affluent and older (at least I assume the average Tesla owner is 25+). The data isn't available when you break down these demographics, but I suspect if it were that 1 death would actually make autopilot deadlier than manual driving. It's a moot point though - anybody trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from a single data point is making a ridiculous claim.

That was my thought when I started watching the show, but as you watch more episodes you realize why the creator didn't go that route. I don't want to spoil it for anybody that isn't a regular viewer.

30 Rock has a great scene making fun of this very scenario. It doesn't seem to be readily available online, although it's on the episode ¡Qué Sorpresa! for those interested. Then Forbes wrote an article explaining why this can never happen.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/01/12/hed-wh...

Edit: It is worth mentioning that Alexa being outside the TV does make a difference, as it's unlikely to have a directional microphone as would likely be installed in the TV.

Because they don't know any better. The goal is to reach people that otherwise don't have the means to invest in startups - they have money, but not expertise.

While I love the idea of crowdsourced equity investing, I think a lot of uneducated (and educated) people will lose money chasing after the hype. Hopefully it will be a learning process and some form of it will continue afterwards that is beneficial for everyone.

I agree with you, but that is the new standard. The NHTSA used to have a much stricter definition, but have since adapted the SAE standards.

The article specifies Level 4 autonomy, which means:

The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required.