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Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech
- krisroadruck 10y agoPicking up Tesla's table scraps for $16B seems like a losing move.
- drcross 10y agoThe split was caused by Tesla pushing targets that Mobileye was not comfortable with. I don't think we know enough about the situation without a report from someone inside the company but it's a little extreme to call them Tesla's table scraps.
- Fricken 10y agoAutopilot is floundering in the absence of Mobileye. It will take Tesla a while before their much more expensive hardware suite with 8 cameras and a Px drive chip (just the chip is worth a few thousand dollars) can match the performance of Mobileye's EyeQ3 and single camera.
- jacobkranz 10y agoTo be fair, Tesla is only using a single camera for their current functionality with the other cameras remaining idle. I agree though that they're not up to AP1 standards yet (even though they stated they would be by end of December).
- patman81 10y agoFor what it's worth: The latest ETA for AP2 to reach parity with AP1 was tweeted by Elon Musk yesterday: "It's been a bear to get done, but prob 10 days or so, depending on full speed autosteer test results" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/841041891747545089 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/841041891747545089
- dharma1 10y agoTesla would have been stuck at level 2/3 with Mobileye. With PX2 you have enough compute power to do much more, and a mature and rapidly developing GPGPU ecosystem (CUDA for ML, SLAM, SfM etc). I do think Nvidia is going to have to bring the price of PX2 down significantly though if they want mass market adoption.
- Fricken 10y agoIt seems Tesla and Mobileye were at one time planning on a bright future together, because Tesla didn't have any kind of a back-up plan. But Mobileye isn't sitting still, so if the relationship hadn't been terminated, Tesla would've been stuck with whatever Mobileye's latest and greatest offering might be. What's interesting is that if you compare the HW2 sensor suite to Mobileye's next-gen sensor plans, they are very similar, almost the same. They were both working on something together before the relationship went sour. Musk hinted recently that 1 PX2 is not enough, and that 2 may be necessary for L4. There's certainly no consensus as to how much compute is needed, the more the better, but I'm skeptical that the hardware costs will be low enough near term to justify putting it in privately owned autonomous cars. I think Tesla has made costly strategic errors in the Autonomy department, and that Musk in particular has repeatedly underestimated the challenge of developing a fully autonomous vehicle. I don't think he's making that mistake anymore.
- argonaut 10y agoAutonomous driving is a software engineering/research problem, not a hardware bottleneck. You couldn't train a good autonomous driving agent even if you used a massive GPU cluster. I'm not saying better hardware doesn't help, it definitely helps incrementally but it's not going to be enough to solve this problem.
- dharma1 10y agoAbsolutely agree. However I'd wager to say that betting on a powerful Nvidia GPU/chipset (piggybacking on general ML/CUDA ecosystem progress) to be able process rapidly advancing autonomous driving algorithms is a more future proof bet for Tesla than relying on already outdated hardware/algorithms from Mobileye.
- ckastner 10y agoI thought $16B for yet another autonomous car developer R&D outfit seemed excessive even by Intel's standards, but it looks as if Mobileye has been providing assistant/enhancing technologies (eg collision warning systems) for more than a decade. This is probably not too bad a spot to be in, at least until fully autonomous vehicles have become mainstream. They seem to be profitable, at least.
- LeonM 10y agoMobileye was founded in 1999, a huge leap of faith to get into the self-driving technology back then.
- phkahler 10y agoI didn't think they were really into self-driving back then. There is a whole range of ADAS capabilities that fall short of taking control of a vehicle.
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- bhouston 10y ago$16B is a great price for Mobileye's team, but I am not sure it is the best move for Intel. But I guess Intel will try to sell package deals to car markers and thus use this to try to keep NVIDIA and ARM from locking up the in-car market. Thus it is a strategic move on Intel's part to fend off competitors rather than reflective of the intrinsic value of Mobileye. BTW what was Mobileye's revenue last year and profit margin? About $350M in 2016, with probably $500M in 2017 it seems. So the multiple is around 30x revenue or so?
- aub3bhat 10y agoThere is no such thing as intrinsic value. There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market. Talking about PE and multiples is pointless for tech companies where synergies and rapid adoption/changes are common.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago>There is no such thing as intrinsic value Intrinsic value usually refers to the present (discounted) value of future earnings. >There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market. How is it determined if all valuation is supposed to be pointless? >Talking about PE and multiples is pointless for tech companies where synergies and rapid adoption/changes are common For a public company that has existed for almost two decades it absolutely makes sense to consider revenue multiples among other factors. It may well be that the value of the company in Intel's hands is worth more than it is worth for other, non-strategic, investors. I agree that there is a lot of potential variability in tech, but that doesn't mean any fantasy price is right just because some people buy some shares at that price (which is what market prices mean)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 10y ago> There is no such thing as intrinsic value. There is price and price ($16B) is determined by the market. "Intrinsic value" is a basic financial term that is widely used and has a well defined meaning - just type the term into Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_value_(finance)
- haroldship 10y agoMy wife has Mobileye in her car - it works quite well - warning you when you're too close to the car in front or when you're wandering out of your lane.
- antoniuschan99 10y agodid it come with the car or is it aftermarket?
- WhiteSource1 10y agoThe collision avoidance systems (I presume OP is speaking about) is aftermarket. That's a small part of Mobileye's business, but it is based on the same technology. BMWs and other high end cars have had Mobileye as OEM for a long time, but the company itself is a bit of a legacy company and not always run well (and is based in Jerusalem which is even more legacy) - but like many Israeli tech stories has great tech.
- exhilaration 10y agoThanks, I wasn't aware of Mobileye's aftermarket products. For the curious: http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-5-series/ http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-5-series/ http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-6-series/ http://www.mobileye.com/en-uk/products/mobileye-6-series/
- ben1040 10y agoI've noticed a bunch of these in Uber/Lyft cars in NYC, but didn't know what they were until I saw TechCrunch linked to a Mobileye press release about installing 4500 of these systems: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobileye-completes-installation-of-collision-avoidance-technology-across-4500-new-york-city-for-hire-vehicles-300409202.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobileye-completes-i...
- antoniuschan99 10y ago
- mtgx 10y agoIntel has made acquisitions of almost $40 billion in the past couple of years. It will be interesting to see if they can make this money back as competition becomes more fierce in the PC and server markets because of AMD and Qualcomm.
- samfisher83 10y agoThey have 95%+ marketshare in server chips. They have an enormous manufacturing advantage. Even though they charge so much for their chips if they feel threatened by Ryzen they can just lower the price of their chips to Ryzen prices because they have a manufacturing advantage. It will just hurt their margins. 40-50% margins forever seem pretty absurd from a pure economics perspective.
- skdotdan 10y agoBut they missed mobile, and PC sales will go down (at some point). Also, ARM on the server?
- samfisher83 10y agoThey didn't miss mobile. Mobile makes poor margins at least for intel so they are not in it. PC sales are already down. Where they make a ton of their money is data centers.
- skdotdan 10y agoThey did. They invested a lot in R+D on mobile processors.
- snovv_crash 10y agoMobile chips is low margin, there is hardly any money in it anyway.
- skdotdan 10y agoThat's right, but then when did they spent so much on mobile R+D?
- iplaw 10y agoI can only assume that Intel will axe some of the C-Suite and attempt to rekindle the flame with Tesla. Mobileye was functioning a bit too much like a traditional (and glacial) vendor in the automotive industry. Tesla wanted to develop and implemented quickly, while Mobileye became a bit too focus on the what-ifs. The truth is, Tesla vehicles are safer than their counterparts in almost every situation imaginable. Mobileye screwed the pooch when they began issuing negative press releases that attempted to push all the responsibility and potential liability onto Tesla. Intel is smarter than that. Intel has become fairly accustomed to implementing and following through with aggressive development and launch cycles.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 10y agoWhat's Intels play here? I'm glad the mobileye team get some nice purim bonus but we'll see in couple of years if Intel won't kill the product (and the team)...
- dogma1138 10y agoA proven platform to compete with NVIDIA in the autonomous car market.
- tw04 10y agoDiversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that.
- phkahler 10y ago>> Diversification. They see the writing on the wall for their CPU business and it's associated margins. They need other high-margin highly in demand tech products to go after. I completely agree. >> Furthermore, I'm guessing x86 has almost no representation in the self-driving car space at the moment. They're probably hoping to change that. But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use.
- samfisher83 10y agoWhy do we still have this misnomer. The front end which decodes the x86 instructions is a small part of the overall chip. Intel made low power chips that were on phones using x86. They just had no competitive advantage in that space and left.
- baq 10y ago> But this, not so much. x86 is way too power hungry (especially for EVs) and way too expensive for automotive use. it isn't a power or efficiency problem. it's a margin problem. vehicle electronics have margins that consumer devices don't. just look at the price of 95% useless in-car satnav.
- krembo 10y agoAnother success story from the Israeli startups scene!
- desdiv 10y agoLet's not use the term "startup" for a company that's 18 years old.
- Fricken 10y agoYeah, they're old school. They've got all sorts of deep industry partnerships and various driver assist and safety products. What they don't have is a Level 4 autonomous driving OS. Nobody does, it doesn't exist yet. The whole 3 ring circus of chipmakers, OEM's, and various component suppliers that stand to benefit from Autonomous vehicles is held aloft by a single tentpole that doesn't actually exist yet. It's just a twinkle in the eye of some AI genius who may very well still be an undergrad at the moment. Intel just spent 15 gigabucks assuaging their fear of missing out. The field of AI and deep learning in particular is changing and progressing so fast that the experts of yesteryear are almost certainly not the people who will build the autonomous OS of the future. There will be a lot of misspent capital between now and the first safe, reliable, market ready, publicly accessible fully autonomous vehicle.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoWith all the peaks and troughs of AI over the years, don't you think we may be due for another trough, that maybe the reason, to quote: >the experts of yesteryear are almost certainly not the people who will build the autonomous OS of the future is because it will be a very long time before we have anything like a Level 4 vehicle?
- Fricken 10y agoIt don't believe we're headed into any kind of AI trough. Very exciting things are happening in the field of deep learning, and the people who are best at understanding and applying all that new theory and research are kids who never leave the lab. Drive.ai is an autonomous driving startup that's made up of mostly unknown Stanford AI lab labmates who dropped out of their PHD programs to build an autonomous OS, and what they're doing is so much more futuristic than what anybody else is doing. They've made more progress in less time with fewer resources than any of the big players. They've got 4 test vehicles, a team of 40 people, they're running on $12 million in venture capital, and they've demoed capabilities that the multi-billion dollar players don't have. They're just pure deep learning guys, they could have gone into fintech or NLP but they went for AVs starting with a blank slate and an abundance of unproven talent. They're still behind Waymo and Cruise, but they're progressing at a higher rate of speed. Everybody in this game is subject to disruption from some nobody coming out of nowhere. Something like transfer learning drops out of the sky, it has the potential to totally revolutionize the way one might think about an Autonomous driving stack, and it all comes down to the genius who figures out how to apply it effectively. That genius could be anyone, no amount of money you spend can buy certainty in this race. Which makes it really fun to watch.
- skdotdan 10y agoIntel has spent billions of dollars in M&A and in R+D and still has missed ARM Holdings, just acquired by Softbank last summer.
- dexterdog 10y agogeohot's gonna be all fired-up.
- debt 10y agokinda funny since we was very anti mobileye and said they didn't know what they were doing and claimed he was gonna be the ceo of a billion dollar company etc and then the gov shuts him down immediately and mobileye gets acquired for 16B. dude needs to get back to hacking iphones it seems.
- dexterdog 10y agoJust because they got acquired doesn't mean he wasn't right about their tech.
- dharma1 10y agoTheir plan is probably to build machine learning/autonomous driving chips combining Intel's own chips/expertise, FPGA (as with their Altera acquisition) and specialist ML chips (like Movidius that they bought recently). $16B for Mobilieye as a route to market (they already have the relationships and supply chains set up with car manufacturing) sounds like a lot but Intel needs a fast track if they want to compete with Nvidia (and ARM and Qualcomm) in that space.
- SEJeff 10y agoAlso of note is that MobileEye is the company that built the sensor and software suite for Telsa's Autopilot generation 1 system. Tesla threw it away due to disagreements and Tesla now uses Nvidia Drive PX 2 (a customized version no doubt) for the number crunching and their own camera suite.
- petra 10y agoOnce you got a really competitive system, how hard is it to build relationships and set up supply chains with car companies ?
- Symmetry 10y agoIf you've got a good enough sense of your algorithms and have a large enough scale to be rolling your own ASIC components you probably don't need an FPGA in you chip.
- mtgx 10y agoJust what I've always wanted from my self-driving car - Mossad Inside.
- SEJeff 10y agoIf you're not a persian scientist you have nothing to worry about I guess. If you do, man... That sucks.
- guelo 10y agoOr if you publicly support BDS
- wolf550e 10y agoThe Mossad has assassinated Iranian physicists. Has the Mossad ever assassinated supporters of BDS?
- guelo 10y agoAt least one Israeli minister has called for “targeted civil eliminations” of BDS leaders. http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/israeli-government-must-cease-intimidation-of-human-rights-defenders-protect-them-from-attacks http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/israeli-govern... Their intelligence services are also known to "sabotage" western citizens involved in BDS. https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-new-strategy-sabotage-and-attack-global-justice-movement/8683 https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-new-strategy-...
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858132.
- saosebastiao 10y agoI have to wonder what sort of market size projections support that kind of price for what is essentially an accessory technology. There's a lot of fanciful fantasies about self driving cars floating around, but I'm not familiar with any of them that would support the idea of a growth market compared to today's dumbcar market. Even today, you can buy entire car companies for that kind of money.
- Animats 10y agoThis after Tesla dumped Mobileye, due to Mobileye's inability to detect stopped vehicles partially blocking a lane. (3 known crashes, one fatality.)
- f137 10y agoBullshit. Mobileye dumped Tesla after they used the Mobileye tech for the aims it was not designed for, causing those crashes.
- mrigor 10y agoAccording to TSLA, Mobileye didn't want their data used to train AP2 https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/tesla-vision-mobileye-tesla-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/tesla-vision-mobileye-tesla-a...
- ronreiter 10y agoBetter not talk about things you have no idea about.