11 ms·

Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial: https://www

Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-trial-trade-secrets-lidar https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria... Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?" "And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."

manux 9y ago
She makes a number of fair points, but: > Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes? Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds. - hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X? - we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4 - oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides? - no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic etc.
- phil21 9y ago
  None of which would be useful for a judge or jury. Heck, I'm generally pretty decent technically compared to the rest of the population and what you wrote here is barely relevant to me.
  - manux 9y ago
    Sure what I just wrote is technobabble, I don't have much self-driving car expertise, but it was just to make a point. From my experience with large scale engineering projects, especially ones with ML involved, the tiniest details can make the stupidest difference.
    - pvg 9y ago
      Sure what I just wrote is technobabble So you are saying you are fooling yourself and you can't do it in 45 seconds.
      - hateduser2 9y ago
        You’re being obtuse
        dang 9y ago
        Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        hateduser2 9y ago
        Is this uncivil? I can see why its unsubstantive (Although my parent wasnt exactly substantive either). Whether or not its against the rules - do you understand my point?
        dang 9y ago
        Yes, "you're being $pejorative" is uncivil. The parent was also a bad comment that deserved to be flagged, but since you took a step further in the wrong direction, yours was the one I chided.
        pvg 9y ago
        Hah, ur fase is a bad comment that deserves to be flagged! The original comment suggested part of the analysis by a reporter and lawyer who is closely following the case got something wrong because hey, they can apparently outline 8 technical trade secrets in 45 seconds by knowingly typing gibberish. The poster wondered whether they are fooling themselves in doing that. By their own words, we can answer that in affirmative as well as recognize they have not, in fact, outlined 8 trade secrets in 45 seconds.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- verroq 9y ago
  Parameters are probably the lowest hanging fruit in any machine learning optimisation, being a trade secret is a big stretch. Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    "Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate." Literally never happens in practice.
  - eachro 9y ago
    Hyperparameter optimization for neural networks can be insanely expensive though[1], to the point where there are even startups (e.g: SigOpt) that do this. [1] https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912 https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912
    - kirillseva 9y ago
      the tweet you link to is architectural search, or figuring out what the neural network should look like (along with its parameters). If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber. Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2]. [0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf [1] - http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt [2] - https://github.com/avantoss/loop https://github.com/avantoss/loop
      - pc86 9y ago
        Before this gets inundated with people making comments about Googler data scientists making $400k, these are folks with PhDs in math or statistics, very accomplished academic literature, leaders in their fields. These are not people messing around with Haskell on the weekends and leaving an insurance firm's IT department to go to Google.
- alex_young 9y ago
  How long do you think it would take to explain that to 10 random strangers?
  - cbhl 9y ago
    Not even ten random strangers. Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries?
    - cicero 9y ago
      As someone who has been on two juries, I object! Jury selection is complicated, and there are limitations to how many potential jurors can be struck. There are also multiple strategies that legal teams may adopt. In my last trial, the plaintiff made a very emotional case, but the defense presented a very logical case. There were two jurors who I would say were logically minded, and we were able to influence the rest of the jury, who were tending to stick on what I thought were irrelevant points. A lawyer friend of mine said that she has seen that one or two logically minded jurors can often steer the jury, and if she is able to put together a logical case, she wants to get some logical people on the jury. (However, being a public defender, she is not always able to put together a nice logical case. She has to do the best she can with what she has to work with.)
      - pc86 9y ago
        Aren't you proving cbhl's point? When she can't put together a logical case and has to rely on "this person has kids please don't send them to prison for this crime they obviously committed," she's going to be trying to keep off the most logical and articulate people at any costs.
        rexaliquid 9y ago
        chbl wrote: "Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries" The point is that smart people are not always dismissed. Different legal strategies work better with different jury selections.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- whack 9y ago
  The 45 minutes she's referring to, is the 45 minutes that Waymo spent talking about it in court. Not 45 minutes that Levandowski spent talking with Uber employees.
  - anfedorov 9y ago
    If all of the models line up a ton, an expert witness could explain that these the chances of reaching the same tuning on all these choices via independent work is practically 0.
- samstave 9y ago
  So, I am sure this will get downvoted, but thi is not my field - but as a curious person.... can you please explain in-long-hand-but-still-like-I-am-5 what your comments means? I dont understand it, but I want to.
  - kirillseva 9y ago
    coursera has a great course on self-driving cars. the only prerequisite is a college course in linear algebra and some python knowledge. If you don't have either of the two the course is still very much approachable - you'll just have to learn two (or three) things at the same time, so expect to double (or triple) the time you sink into it. It's worth it
icebraining 9y ago
8 trade secrets (down from 100s) Was this by their own will? Back in the Oracle v Google trial, which had the same judge, he asked Oracle to cut down the 132 claims to only 3 - which Oracle was not happy about.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  No. Judge Alsup told them to knock it down into the reasonable range. ("Less than 10") I believe it got stripped down to 9, and then one got thrown out of that group.
  - Fricken 9y ago
    All the trade secrets claims were plan B for Waymo. The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out. What was supposed to be the original slam dunk for Waymo, 'trade secret 96', Which referred to PCB circuit diagrams that were accidently emailed to Waymo instead of Uber ATG by a shared supplier, was even dropped. Waymo's whole case was pretty flimsy.
    - powercf 9y ago
      > The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out. Possibly because the patents were invalid due to the existence of prior art? Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685
      - Fricken 9y ago
        The prior art cited in that news item only invalidated 'patent 936'. (That's my comment there, 3rd from top). The infringement claims were thrown out earlier than that (September 2017, IIRC).
        opo 9y ago
        >...The infringement claims were thrown out earlier than that (September 2017, IIRC). According to the article, the infringement claims were dropped after Waymo was notified of the USPTO reexamination that was going to be done due to Swildens filing the ex parte reexamination request. >...So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1. Waymo dropped the claims relating to the 936 patent on Sep 13. >...Swildens, naturally, thinks his reexamination request played a role. He notes that USPTO had a phone interview with Waymo’s lawyers a few days before, on September 8, at which the examiners presumably told Waymo that a reexamination of the 936 would be going ahead. If the reexamination started while the patent was being actively litigated, Uber and the court would have to be informed. https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/ https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...
malandrew 9y ago
there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers Just a minor correction: Waymo has not demonstrated that the files went any further than the disks Levandowski had. To date, nothing belonging to Waymo has been found on Uber's servers.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I am not sure that is a minor correction. My guess is that Waymo bet on finding such evidence through discovery, but all it ended up with is armfuls of what is, at best, circumstantial evidence of collusion.
perseusprime11 9y ago
It is quite simple to explain. When your best guy gets hired away from your company, you are generally angry at the company that stole your employee, not the employee. Most of the tech is still trial and error so patents don't hold much water at this point unless you are TESLA. So this was always about "See what I can do to you because you hired my best guy"
mbesto 9y ago
According to the Techmeme headline Uber pledges not to use Waymo trade secrets: "Uber settles Waymo lawsuit, pledges not to use Waymo's trade secrets; Waymo will receive 0.34% stake in Uber worth about $245M" So how is this not a win for Waymo?
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
  Uber has a significant documented history of flouting both the law and agreements they've made?
  - mbesto 9y ago
    1. DK has clearly been telegraphing that they are no longer accepting practices of flouting agreements, no? 2. Isn't that exactly what this settlement is intending to do? It sets the legal precedence for "don't skirt this one, we're serious about it".
- fullshark 9y ago
  The real win for Waymo is what happened to Levandowski and Kalanick after they filed the complaint.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Uber lost two key employees and paid Waymo for the trouble. Waymo/Google counsel earned their annual bonus.
  - whack 9y ago
    Is it really? I would think Waymo's primary goal is making money for their shareholders, not pursuing personal vendettas.
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      I would imagine that weakening a competitor in their space would be decently correlated with expected return for shareholders. Not sure where you got the idea that the only benefit would be "personal".
amatecha 9y ago
I mean, yeah, 45 minutes is more than enough to exchange a ton of really critical information about a specific solution to a given technical/product problem (for example)...
grizzles 9y ago
The lawyers did such a bad job. They bungled the litigation. Now it seems like they have endorsed a strategic option (settlement) that was way too risk averse. Alphabet had already won the PR war. They had alot to gain by grinding Uber into the dirt. Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. I can imagine that Larry Page must not be very happy right now.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. The value of the settlement for Alphabet is not in the stock, it is in the “agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software.” Of course, the details of that aren't going to be shared, but that's the thing matters. > Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. Are they? I know GV has a significant stake in Uber, and Waymo has a cooperative deal with Lyft, but I don't recall Alphabet or any of it's subsidiaries holding a big share of Lyft. Edit: as pointed out in the response, Alphabet is invested in Lyft through CapitalG.
  - jy1 9y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503742/lyft-capitalg-google-fundraising-venture-billion https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503742/lyft-capitalg-g...
  - siruncledrew 9y ago
    I'm not sure how much I would trust any promise from Uber to not continue to use technology they already have, even if it was stolen. Uber doesn't seem the company to just say "Ok" and delete the information that wasn't theirs. I would be skeptical a lot of under the table development is still in action, but with a better mindset of not getting caught in place.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
ABCLAW 9y ago
The article is not a very comprehensive look at what's going on. The thread running through the comments - that the case Waymo had against Uber was flimsy - is questionable. You don't toss someone a few hundred million dollars because your case is 'flimsy', and 'winning or losing' in court is too simplistic an analysis of the impact of the lawsuit on both sides as well as their third party competitors. The Jeong article reads like someone read Uber's submissions to the court, phrased them in common vernacular, then ignored everything that didn't fit their narrative.
- burner890 9y ago
  You do toss someone a couple hundred million in private equity for an immediate end to the damage to the company's brand, legal fees and recruiting efforts. If Uber was in any real jeopardy of being found liable here they would have settled for far more. We know this because if Uber lost the case outright they would face an injunction against their self-driving business that would probably force them to license Waymo tech or put an end to the whole endeavor. Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing.
  - cma 9y ago
    > Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing. The settlement wasn't just for money, it also barred Uber from use of some of the disputed trade secrets/technology, which could be valuable for Google. Given that Uber hasn't monetized the technology yet, it would be hard to prove any damages. The outcome of a trial could have been a similar amount and an injunction and still been a big win for Google if the future self driving market is really going to be big and if the covered technology really was crucial.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - 9y ago

manux 9y ago

She makes a number of fair points, but: > Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes? Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds. - hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X? - we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4 - oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides? - no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic etc.

phil21 9y ago
None of which would be useful for a judge or jury. Heck, I'm generally pretty decent technically compared to the rest of the population and what you wrote here is barely relevant to me.
- manux 9y ago
  Sure what I just wrote is technobabble, I don't have much self-driving car expertise, but it was just to make a point. From my experience with large scale engineering projects, especially ones with ML involved, the tiniest details can make the stupidest difference.
  - pvg 9y ago
    Sure what I just wrote is technobabble So you are saying you are fooling yourself and you can't do it in 45 seconds.
    - hateduser2 9y ago
      You’re being obtuse
      - dang 9y ago
        Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        hateduser2 9y ago
        Is this uncivil? I can see why its unsubstantive (Although my parent wasnt exactly substantive either). Whether or not its against the rules - do you understand my point?
        dang 9y ago
        Yes, "you're being $pejorative" is uncivil. The parent was also a bad comment that deserved to be flagged, but since you took a step further in the wrong direction, yours was the one I chided.
        pvg 9y ago
        Hah, ur fase is a bad comment that deserves to be flagged! The original comment suggested part of the analysis by a reporter and lawyer who is closely following the case got something wrong because hey, they can apparently outline 8 technical trade secrets in 45 seconds by knowingly typing gibberish. The poster wondered whether they are fooling themselves in doing that. By their own words, we can answer that in affirmative as well as recognize they have not, in fact, outlined 8 trade secrets in 45 seconds.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
verroq 9y ago
Parameters are probably the lowest hanging fruit in any machine learning optimisation, being a trade secret is a big stretch. Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  "Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate." Literally never happens in practice.
- eachro 9y ago
  Hyperparameter optimization for neural networks can be insanely expensive though[1], to the point where there are even startups (e.g: SigOpt) that do this. [1] https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912 https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912
  - kirillseva 9y ago
    the tweet you link to is architectural search, or figuring out what the neural network should look like (along with its parameters). If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber. Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2]. [0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf [1] - http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt [2] - https://github.com/avantoss/loop https://github.com/avantoss/loop
    - pc86 9y ago
      Before this gets inundated with people making comments about Googler data scientists making $400k, these are folks with PhDs in math or statistics, very accomplished academic literature, leaders in their fields. These are not people messing around with Haskell on the weekends and leaving an insurance firm's IT department to go to Google.
alex_young 9y ago
How long do you think it would take to explain that to 10 random strangers?
- cbhl 9y ago
  Not even ten random strangers. Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries?
  - cicero 9y ago
    As someone who has been on two juries, I object! Jury selection is complicated, and there are limitations to how many potential jurors can be struck. There are also multiple strategies that legal teams may adopt. In my last trial, the plaintiff made a very emotional case, but the defense presented a very logical case. There were two jurors who I would say were logically minded, and we were able to influence the rest of the jury, who were tending to stick on what I thought were irrelevant points. A lawyer friend of mine said that she has seen that one or two logically minded jurors can often steer the jury, and if she is able to put together a logical case, she wants to get some logical people on the jury. (However, being a public defender, she is not always able to put together a nice logical case. She has to do the best she can with what she has to work with.)
    - pc86 9y ago
      Aren't you proving cbhl's point? When she can't put together a logical case and has to rely on "this person has kids please don't send them to prison for this crime they obviously committed," she's going to be trying to keep off the most logical and articulate people at any costs.
      - rexaliquid 9y ago
        chbl wrote: "Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries" The point is that smart people are not always dismissed. Different legal strategies work better with different jury selections.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
whack 9y ago
The 45 minutes she's referring to, is the 45 minutes that Waymo spent talking about it in court. Not 45 minutes that Levandowski spent talking with Uber employees.
- anfedorov 9y ago
  If all of the models line up a ton, an expert witness could explain that these the chances of reaching the same tuning on all these choices via independent work is practically 0.
samstave 9y ago
So, I am sure this will get downvoted, but thi is not my field - but as a curious person.... can you please explain in-long-hand-but-still-like-I-am-5 what your comments means? I dont understand it, but I want to.
- kirillseva 9y ago
  coursera has a great course on self-driving cars. the only prerequisite is a college course in linear algebra and some python knowledge. If you don't have either of the two the course is still very much approachable - you'll just have to learn two (or three) things at the same time, so expect to double (or triple) the time you sink into it. It's worth it

icebraining 9y ago

8 trade secrets (down from 100s) Was this by their own will? Back in the Oracle v Google trial, which had the same judge, he asked Oracle to cut down the 132 claims to only 3 - which Oracle was not happy about.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
No. Judge Alsup told them to knock it down into the reasonable range. ("Less than 10") I believe it got stripped down to 9, and then one got thrown out of that group.
- Fricken 9y ago
  All the trade secrets claims were plan B for Waymo. The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out. What was supposed to be the original slam dunk for Waymo, 'trade secret 96', Which referred to PCB circuit diagrams that were accidently emailed to Waymo instead of Uber ATG by a shared supplier, was even dropped. Waymo's whole case was pretty flimsy.
  - powercf 9y ago
    > The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out. Possibly because the patents were invalid due to the existence of prior art? Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685
    - Fricken 9y ago
      The prior art cited in that news item only invalidated 'patent 936'. (That's my comment there, 3rd from top). The infringement claims were thrown out earlier than that (September 2017, IIRC).
      - opo 9y ago
        >...The infringement claims were thrown out earlier than that (September 2017, IIRC). According to the article, the infringement claims were dropped after Waymo was notified of the USPTO reexamination that was going to be done due to Swildens filing the ex parte reexamination request. >...So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1. Waymo dropped the claims relating to the 936 patent on Sep 13. >...Swildens, naturally, thinks his reexamination request played a role. He notes that USPTO had a phone interview with Waymo’s lawyers a few days before, on September 8, at which the examiners presumably told Waymo that a reexamination of the 936 would be going ahead. If the reexamination started while the patent was being actively litigated, Uber and the court would have to be informed. https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/ https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...

malandrew 9y ago

there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers Just a minor correction: Waymo has not demonstrated that the files went any further than the disks Levandowski had. To date, nothing belonging to Waymo has been found on Uber's servers.

mannykannot 9y ago
I am not sure that is a minor correction. My guess is that Waymo bet on finding such evidence through discovery, but all it ended up with is armfuls of what is, at best, circumstantial evidence of collusion.

perseusprime11 9y ago

It is quite simple to explain. When your best guy gets hired away from your company, you are generally angry at the company that stole your employee, not the employee. Most of the tech is still trial and error so patents don't hold much water at this point unless you are TESLA. So this was always about "See what I can do to you because you hired my best guy"

mbesto 9y ago

According to the Techmeme headline Uber pledges not to use Waymo trade secrets: "Uber settles Waymo lawsuit, pledges not to use Waymo's trade secrets; Waymo will receive 0.34% stake in Uber worth about $245M" So how is this not a win for Waymo?

dogecoinbase 9y ago
Uber has a significant documented history of flouting both the law and agreements they've made?
- mbesto 9y ago
  1. DK has clearly been telegraphing that they are no longer accepting practices of flouting agreements, no? 2. Isn't that exactly what this settlement is intending to do? It sets the legal precedence for "don't skirt this one, we're serious about it".
fullshark 9y ago
The real win for Waymo is what happened to Levandowski and Kalanick after they filed the complaint.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Uber lost two key employees and paid Waymo for the trouble. Waymo/Google counsel earned their annual bonus.
- whack 9y ago
  Is it really? I would think Waymo's primary goal is making money for their shareholders, not pursuing personal vendettas.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    I would imagine that weakening a competitor in their space would be decently correlated with expected return for shareholders. Not sure where you got the idea that the only benefit would be "personal".

amatecha 9y ago

I mean, yeah, 45 minutes is more than enough to exchange a ton of really critical information about a specific solution to a given technical/product problem (for example)...

grizzles 9y ago

The lawyers did such a bad job. They bungled the litigation. Now it seems like they have endorsed a strategic option (settlement) that was way too risk averse. Alphabet had already won the PR war. They had alot to gain by grinding Uber into the dirt. Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. I can imagine that Larry Page must not be very happy right now.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. The value of the settlement for Alphabet is not in the stock, it is in the “agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software.” Of course, the details of that aren't going to be shared, but that's the thing matters. > Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. Are they? I know GV has a significant stake in Uber, and Waymo has a cooperative deal with Lyft, but I don't recall Alphabet or any of it's subsidiaries holding a big share of Lyft. Edit: as pointed out in the response, Alphabet is invested in Lyft through CapitalG.
- jy1 9y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503742/lyft-capitalg-google-fundraising-venture-billion https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503742/lyft-capitalg-g...
- siruncledrew 9y ago
  I'm not sure how much I would trust any promise from Uber to not continue to use technology they already have, even if it was stolen. Uber doesn't seem the company to just say "Ok" and delete the information that wasn't theirs. I would be skeptical a lot of under the table development is still in action, but with a better mindset of not getting caught in place.
  - thanksgiving 9y ago

ABCLAW 9y ago

The article is not a very comprehensive look at what's going on. The thread running through the comments - that the case Waymo had against Uber was flimsy - is questionable. You don't toss someone a few hundred million dollars because your case is 'flimsy', and 'winning or losing' in court is too simplistic an analysis of the impact of the lawsuit on both sides as well as their third party competitors. The Jeong article reads like someone read Uber's submissions to the court, phrased them in common vernacular, then ignored everything that didn't fit their narrative.

burner890 9y ago
You do toss someone a couple hundred million in private equity for an immediate end to the damage to the company's brand, legal fees and recruiting efforts. If Uber was in any real jeopardy of being found liable here they would have settled for far more. We know this because if Uber lost the case outright they would face an injunction against their self-driving business that would probably force them to license Waymo tech or put an end to the whole endeavor. Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing.
- cma 9y ago
  > Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing. The settlement wasn't just for money, it also barred Uber from use of some of the disputed trade secrets/technology, which could be valuable for Google. Given that Uber hasn't monetized the technology yet, it would be hard to prove any damages. The outcome of a trial could have been a similar amount and an injunction and still been a big win for Google if the future self driving market is really going to be big and if the covered technology really was crucial.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- 9y ago