10 ms·

Did Uber steal Google’s intellectual property?

176 points by Fricken 8y ago

Fricken 8y ago
The article dedicates a good deal of page space to adding fresh verse to the Ballad of Anthony Levandowski before it gets into addressing the question asked in the headline, but it's all very good reading.
xrd 8y ago
The best thing about this article: > Levandowski refused to discuss the case with reporters but attracted headlines with a curveball revelation: he had founded a church, called the Way of the Future, that was devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” Machines would eventually become more powerful than humans, he proclaimed, and the members of his church would prepare themselves, intellectually and spiritually, for that momentous transition. Some people wondered if the church, as a nonprofit organization, was a scheme to protect Levandowski’s fortune, but he assured reporters that he was sincere. “I don’t believe in God,” he told me. “But I do believe that we are creating something that basically, as far as we’re concerned, will be like God to us.”
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  AI can never be God, and won't ever be 'like God to us'. Not in a billion years. It's funny how so many of the 'unfaithful' seem to lack the capacity for metaphysical thought. This guy also seems a little bit crazy, and not in the good way.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Replying to my own comment as an edit: I used 'unfaithful' in jest almost academic sarcasm, not seriously in any way. I am always amazed at both the narrow materialism, and hyper grandiosity of these people. 'Starting his own religion' (especially based around technology!) is a massive red flag ... extreme and also misplaced egoism. This guy is a 'jump the shark' moment for the Valley.
uptown 8y ago
"One day in 2011, a Google executive named Isaac Taylor learned that, while he was on paternity leave, Levandowski had modified the cars’ software so that he could take them on otherwise forbidden routes. A Google executive recalls witnessing Taylor and Levandowski shouting at each other. Levandowski told Taylor that the only way to show him why his approach was necessary was to take a ride together. The men, both still furious, jumped into a self-driving Prius and headed off. The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries." These things sound like they require way more oversight before they should be allowed on the road if a single engineer can override protections like these.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  The problem isn't a single engineer overriding protections. According to the article they all knew about it, including other executives, and failed to report or discipline Levandowski. They only fired him after he tried to recruit other employees, which demonstrates how exactly they prioritize safety versus profits. They should not be allowed on the road, but not because of a single engineer, but because of their corporate culture. edit: he wasn't fired, he quit.
  - dilyevsky 8y ago
    Afaik they never fired him - he quit
    - Natsu 8y ago
      The part that bothers me most is that they never seemed to care about this while he worked there, why are we hearing about it so long after the fact? Given the unnamed Google sources being quoted, they would appear to be the source for much of this story. This quote seems to sum it up for me: “He was that kind of guy,” the co-worker said. “You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.”
oldgradstudent 8y ago
So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property damage. Everyone knew about it, everyone watched the video, but no one saw fit to report the incident or take responsibility. So all the claims about 10 million miles without any serious incident are, effectively, false. What else are they hiding? How safe these cars really are?
- hnaccy 8y ago
  I thought I was having intense deja vu but google has this archived form two days ago. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO631OSsJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D18223066+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO6... Does hackernews move posts around and change their timestamps?
  - Deimorz 8y ago
    I can't remember if there's a specific term for it, but I believe HN has some way of giving a story a "second chance", which must have been used here and seems to involve resetting the timestamps. I don't know if this link will continue working, but if you look at it through this view, the comment that you're replying to shows as "2 days ago": https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=18223066 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=... But if you link to it directly, it shows as (currently) "4 hours ago": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066 I can understand the second-chance idea, but lying about when comments were posted is very strange.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  It certainly wasn't a hit-and-run because you can't have a hit-and-run if you don't hit anything. I'd be curious to see the video; it sounds like the other driver could have easily adjusted to the Google car by braking and merging in behind it.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  > So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property damage. That's pretty hyperbolic and loose with the facts. You can't call it a hit and run, because Google's car did not hit the other vehicle. You cannot say that Google was at fault for the incident because they had the right of way. While slowing down to let the other car merge would have been safer for everybody, it is on the merging vehicle to ensure they have space to merge safely and to safely respond if vehicles in the lane they are trying to forcibly merge into doesn't make space for them. There is certainly a point to be made about what type of incidents are being reported. Incidents like this, where the self driving car behaves unexpectedly but legally are important information as we try to create the regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles.
slivym 8y ago
"Most of the race’s competitors had built automated cars, but Levandowski had constructed a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider—in part, he later admitted, because he hoped that its novelty would draw attention. Although Ghostrider performed rather pitifully in its début, breaking down a few feet from the starting line, in almost every other respect it was a success: the audacity of Levandowski’s creation, coupled with his talent for charming journalists, made him the competition’s star. The National Museum of American History acquired Ghostrider for its permanent collection, and in 2007 Levandowski—then twenty-seven years old, with only a master’s degree in engineering from U.C. Berkeley—was offered a job at Google worth millions of dollars." Silicon valley in a nut shell folks. Completely disregard ethics and hey presto a few years down the line the total fraudster you hired turns out to have been unethical! Whodathunk!
- twtw 8y ago
  This article made me feel nauseated. All these big name hotshots and Google execs so full of BS they can't even manage to fire this guy. This is what a lot of Silicon Valley has become, but it has not always been this way and there are still some legitimate companies that that do in fact wear clothes - mostly semiconductor companies though.
  - dilyevsky 8y ago
    How are sociopathic tendencies of higher echelons of corporate management news to anyone? The only “newsworthy” part of it is it relates to google (which isn’t really news to anyone who’s been on the inside). If it was abouy some finance firm nobody would bat an eye
    - acdha 8y ago
      It’s not news in general but many people liked to pretend it wasn’t true of Silicon Valley or at least favorite companies like Google: sure, there are sharks in most places but we’re a strict meritocracy where only results matter! That’s been cracking over time as e.g. people noticed that all of the cool stuff Google does is a sideline for selling ads, Uber is a gypsy cab company which would fail the instant they had to comply with the law or pay for externalities, etc. Rather than letting SV redesign the world we’re hope the world will rein it in enough before more people are hurt. Given how strong that self-image has been in tech culture for decades, a lot of people are going to have strong emotions when it’s no longer possible to maintain cognitive dissonance.
neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/GVage http://archive.is/GVage
tyingq 8y ago
Curious if the invalidated patents[1] make this harder to prove. I suppose trade secrets don't have to be patents. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-waymo-in-lidar-patent-battle/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-wa...
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Patents, by definition, are not trade secrets, since they are made public.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 8y ago
> One juror, clearly a gamer, whispered to his neighbor and, as if holding a controller, mimed the start of a classic Nintendo cheat code: “up,” “up,” “down,” “down.” This isn't the entire code, and it's normally referred to as the "Konami code" since it appears across platforms in Konami games.
deepnotderp 8y ago
One of Waymo's alleged trade secrets was that they used a fiber laser. This is well known LIDAR technology. They also apparently think diode alingment pins are a trade secret. In the trial they also made it seem like Waymo invented the concept of monostatic LIDAR. My guess as to what happened is that Waymo has nothing solid on Levandowski but he acted extremely supiciously and they hoped to find anything he had stolen in the process of the lawsuitl
deepnotderp 8y ago
Also interestingly enough, Uber's uncompleted "Spider" LIDAR used 1550nm, which I find to be interesting. Why pivot back to 905nm?
baoha 8y ago
I wonder how much Sebastian Thrun was involved during this time frame. Isn't he also a key player behind Google self-driving car project? I don't even remember whether he was on the witness stand during the trial between Google and Uber.
opportune 8y ago
Is anybody naive enough to think that these companies would give up on creating self-driving cars if they were not able to patent some of their technology? I don't think you can really even make the argument that patents, in this case, encourage innovation (across the industry - they do incentivize grabbing potentially useful patents as fast as possible for individual companies), nor that they benefit consumers.
tropdrop 8y ago
Buried at the bottom, Levandowski's controversial world wisdom - "The only thing that matters is the future,” [Levandowski] told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." To what extent does this attitude represent Silicon Valley? More usefully, could we avoid some ill-bred start-up ideas and venture capital wasted if the attitude of Silicon Valley was changed to include just a little more care about history?
- dmitrygr 8y ago
  Sadly 100%. Most startups try to "disrupt" things they do not understand. Often with predictable results.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    But occasionally with unpredictable results, which topples incumbent corporations who refuse to innovate or reduce costs, which is why startups succeed. In that respect maybe the startup's attitude isn't so bad.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  That is very sad. I can only hope that Levandowski someday stumbles upon James Burke’s documentary series Connections and gains an appreciation for how science and technology can develop in unpredictable ways far beyond the expectations or aims of the creators. A hundred years from now I bet history professors will bring up Levandowski as “one of those Silicon Valley jackasses who thought they were building the future but had no idea how they arrived at the present.”
- Fezzik 8y ago
  Levandowski's sentament seems extraordinarily ignorant. I immediately thought of the "you should skate where the puck is going" quote which, I think, implies the importance of having information about the history of the puck and how the puck behaves, while acknowledging that the future is the goal. Obviously you want to end up in the future, where the puck is, but it is well-nigh impossible to get there unless you have good information about the past.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the world. > “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. > Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident. Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity to learn how to avoid similar mistakes. He sent colleagues an e-mail with video of the near-collision. Its subject line was “Prius vs. Camry.” God save us all from engineers with a Messiah complex who think a few boring little lives are a small price to pay for progress.
Animats 8y ago
Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? Probably not, if it's in the LIDAR area. Google's LIDAR is still an expensive spinning unit for experimental vehicles. The production solution is going to be some other technology - flash, MEMS, or something else that's more solid state. Continental and Luminar have both demoed reasonably good automotive flash LIDARs. Google/Waymo may have some proprietary technology in LIDAR data reduction. There are hints of that in Urmson's 2016 SXSW talk. Lots of people are trying to apply machine learning to camera images, but applying it to LIDAR is probably more likely to work. Less ambiguous data. But there's no indication of that being an area of litigation. I met Levandowski briefly when he was preparing for the DARPA Grand Challenge. He was still a student at UC Berkley then. His real achievement was that, after the DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2008, he built a self-driving car able to cross the Bay Bridge for the Discovery Channel.[1] That's where Google got their start in self-driving. There was not a rush, after the Grand Challenge, to throw money at the problem. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...
kerng 8y ago
I thought Google had fired Levandowski but it seems he quit. Quite interesting recently to get insights on how/when things go bad at Google and then they arent holding folks accountable, possibly even hiding information.
partingshots 8y ago
The absolute hatred that this author for Silicon Valley is a little disconcerting to be honest. It’s make it difficult to take the person seriously.

176 points by Fricken 8y ago

The article dedicates a good deal of page space to adding fresh verse to the Ballad of Anthony Levandowski before it gets into addressing the question asked in the headline, but it's all very good reading.

xrd 8y ago

The best thing about this article: > Levandowski refused to discuss the case with reporters but attracted headlines with a curveball revelation: he had founded a church, called the Way of the Future, that was devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” Machines would eventually become more powerful than humans, he proclaimed, and the members of his church would prepare themselves, intellectually and spiritually, for that momentous transition. Some people wondered if the church, as a nonprofit organization, was a scheme to protect Levandowski’s fortune, but he assured reporters that he was sincere. “I don’t believe in God,” he told me. “But I do believe that we are creating something that basically, as far as we’re concerned, will be like God to us.”

sonnyblarney 8y ago
AI can never be God, and won't ever be 'like God to us'. Not in a billion years. It's funny how so many of the 'unfaithful' seem to lack the capacity for metaphysical thought. This guy also seems a little bit crazy, and not in the good way.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Replying to my own comment as an edit: I used 'unfaithful' in jest almost academic sarcasm, not seriously in any way. I am always amazed at both the narrow materialism, and hyper grandiosity of these people. 'Starting his own religion' (especially based around technology!) is a massive red flag ... extreme and also misplaced egoism. This guy is a 'jump the shark' moment for the Valley.

uptown 8y ago

"One day in 2011, a Google executive named Isaac Taylor learned that, while he was on paternity leave, Levandowski had modified the cars’ software so that he could take them on otherwise forbidden routes. A Google executive recalls witnessing Taylor and Levandowski shouting at each other. Levandowski told Taylor that the only way to show him why his approach was necessary was to take a ride together. The men, both still furious, jumped into a self-driving Prius and headed off. The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries." These things sound like they require way more oversight before they should be allowed on the road if a single engineer can override protections like these.

oldgradstudent 8y ago
The problem isn't a single engineer overriding protections. According to the article they all knew about it, including other executives, and failed to report or discipline Levandowski. They only fired him after he tried to recruit other employees, which demonstrates how exactly they prioritize safety versus profits. They should not be allowed on the road, but not because of a single engineer, but because of their corporate culture. edit: he wasn't fired, he quit.
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  Afaik they never fired him - he quit
  - Natsu 8y ago
    The part that bothers me most is that they never seemed to care about this while he worked there, why are we hearing about it so long after the fact? Given the unnamed Google sources being quoted, they would appear to be the source for much of this story. This quote seems to sum it up for me: “He was that kind of guy,” the co-worker said. “You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.”

oldgradstudent 8y ago

So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property damage. Everyone knew about it, everyone watched the video, but no one saw fit to report the incident or take responsibility. So all the claims about 10 million miles without any serious incident are, effectively, false. What else are they hiding? How safe these cars really are?

hnaccy 8y ago
I thought I was having intense deja vu but google has this archived form two days ago. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO631OSsJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D18223066+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO6... Does hackernews move posts around and change their timestamps?
- Deimorz 8y ago
  I can't remember if there's a specific term for it, but I believe HN has some way of giving a story a "second chance", which must have been used here and seems to involve resetting the timestamps. I don't know if this link will continue working, but if you look at it through this view, the comment that you're replying to shows as "2 days ago": https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=18223066 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=... But if you link to it directly, it shows as (currently) "4 hours ago": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066 I can understand the second-chance idea, but lying about when comments were posted is very strange.
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
It certainly wasn't a hit-and-run because you can't have a hit-and-run if you don't hit anything. I'd be curious to see the video; it sounds like the other driver could have easily adjusted to the Google car by braking and merging in behind it.
shkkmo 8y ago
> So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property damage. That's pretty hyperbolic and loose with the facts. You can't call it a hit and run, because Google's car did not hit the other vehicle. You cannot say that Google was at fault for the incident because they had the right of way. While slowing down to let the other car merge would have been safer for everybody, it is on the merging vehicle to ensure they have space to merge safely and to safely respond if vehicles in the lane they are trying to forcibly merge into doesn't make space for them. There is certainly a point to be made about what type of incidents are being reported. Incidents like this, where the self driving car behaves unexpectedly but legally are important information as we try to create the regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles.

slivym 8y ago

"Most of the race’s competitors had built automated cars, but Levandowski had constructed a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider—in part, he later admitted, because he hoped that its novelty would draw attention. Although Ghostrider performed rather pitifully in its début, breaking down a few feet from the starting line, in almost every other respect it was a success: the audacity of Levandowski’s creation, coupled with his talent for charming journalists, made him the competition’s star. The National Museum of American History acquired Ghostrider for its permanent collection, and in 2007 Levandowski—then twenty-seven years old, with only a master’s degree in engineering from U.C. Berkeley—was offered a job at Google worth millions of dollars." Silicon valley in a nut shell folks. Completely disregard ethics and hey presto a few years down the line the total fraudster you hired turns out to have been unethical! Whodathunk!

twtw 8y ago
This article made me feel nauseated. All these big name hotshots and Google execs so full of BS they can't even manage to fire this guy. This is what a lot of Silicon Valley has become, but it has not always been this way and there are still some legitimate companies that that do in fact wear clothes - mostly semiconductor companies though.
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  How are sociopathic tendencies of higher echelons of corporate management news to anyone? The only “newsworthy” part of it is it relates to google (which isn’t really news to anyone who’s been on the inside). If it was abouy some finance firm nobody would bat an eye
  - acdha 8y ago
    It’s not news in general but many people liked to pretend it wasn’t true of Silicon Valley or at least favorite companies like Google: sure, there are sharks in most places but we’re a strict meritocracy where only results matter! That’s been cracking over time as e.g. people noticed that all of the cool stuff Google does is a sideline for selling ads, Uber is a gypsy cab company which would fail the instant they had to comply with the law or pay for externalities, etc. Rather than letting SV redesign the world we’re hope the world will rein it in enough before more people are hurt. Given how strong that self-image has been in tech culture for decades, a lot of people are going to have strong emotions when it’s no longer possible to maintain cognitive dissonance.

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/GVage http://archive.is/GVage

tyingq 8y ago

Curious if the invalidated patents[1] make this harder to prove. I suppose trade secrets don't have to be patents. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-waymo-in-lidar-patent-battle/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-wa...

jcranmer 8y ago
Patents, by definition, are not trade secrets, since they are made public.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

saagarjha 8y ago

> One juror, clearly a gamer, whispered to his neighbor and, as if holding a controller, mimed the start of a classic Nintendo cheat code: “up,” “up,” “down,” “down.” This isn't the entire code, and it's normally referred to as the "Konami code" since it appears across platforms in Konami games.

deepnotderp 8y ago

One of Waymo's alleged trade secrets was that they used a fiber laser. This is well known LIDAR technology. They also apparently think diode alingment pins are a trade secret. In the trial they also made it seem like Waymo invented the concept of monostatic LIDAR. My guess as to what happened is that Waymo has nothing solid on Levandowski but he acted extremely supiciously and they hoped to find anything he had stolen in the process of the lawsuitl

deepnotderp 8y ago

Also interestingly enough, Uber's uncompleted "Spider" LIDAR used 1550nm, which I find to be interesting. Why pivot back to 905nm?

baoha 8y ago

I wonder how much Sebastian Thrun was involved during this time frame. Isn't he also a key player behind Google self-driving car project? I don't even remember whether he was on the witness stand during the trial between Google and Uber.

opportune 8y ago

Is anybody naive enough to think that these companies would give up on creating self-driving cars if they were not able to patent some of their technology? I don't think you can really even make the argument that patents, in this case, encourage innovation (across the industry - they do incentivize grabbing potentially useful patents as fast as possible for individual companies), nor that they benefit consumers.

tropdrop 8y ago

Buried at the bottom, Levandowski's controversial world wisdom - "The only thing that matters is the future,” [Levandowski] told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." To what extent does this attitude represent Silicon Valley? More usefully, could we avoid some ill-bred start-up ideas and venture capital wasted if the attitude of Silicon Valley was changed to include just a little more care about history?

dmitrygr 8y ago
Sadly 100%. Most startups try to "disrupt" things they do not understand. Often with predictable results.
- onion2k 8y ago
  But occasionally with unpredictable results, which topples incumbent corporations who refuse to innovate or reduce costs, which is why startups succeed. In that respect maybe the startup's attitude isn't so bad.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
That is very sad. I can only hope that Levandowski someday stumbles upon James Burke’s documentary series Connections and gains an appreciation for how science and technology can develop in unpredictable ways far beyond the expectations or aims of the creators. A hundred years from now I bet history professors will bring up Levandowski as “one of those Silicon Valley jackasses who thought they were building the future but had no idea how they arrived at the present.”
Fezzik 8y ago
Levandowski's sentament seems extraordinarily ignorant. I immediately thought of the "you should skate where the puck is going" quote which, I think, implies the importance of having information about the history of the puck and how the puck behaves, while acknowledging that the future is the goal. Obviously you want to end up in the future, where the puck is, but it is well-nigh impossible to get there unless you have good information about the past.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

> he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the world. > “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. > Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident. Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity to learn how to avoid similar mistakes. He sent colleagues an e-mail with video of the near-collision. Its subject line was “Prius vs. Camry.” God save us all from engineers with a Messiah complex who think a few boring little lives are a small price to pay for progress.

Animats 8y ago

Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? Probably not, if it's in the LIDAR area. Google's LIDAR is still an expensive spinning unit for experimental vehicles. The production solution is going to be some other technology - flash, MEMS, or something else that's more solid state. Continental and Luminar have both demoed reasonably good automotive flash LIDARs. Google/Waymo may have some proprietary technology in LIDAR data reduction. There are hints of that in Urmson's 2016 SXSW talk. Lots of people are trying to apply machine learning to camera images, but applying it to LIDAR is probably more likely to work. Less ambiguous data. But there's no indication of that being an area of litigation. I met Levandowski briefly when he was preparing for the DARPA Grand Challenge. He was still a student at UC Berkley then. His real achievement was that, after the DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2008, he built a self-driving car able to cross the Bay Bridge for the Discovery Channel.[1] That's where Google got their start in self-driving. There was not a rush, after the Grand Challenge, to throw money at the problem. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...

kerng 8y ago

I thought Google had fired Levandowski but it seems he quit. Quite interesting recently to get insights on how/when things go bad at Google and then they arent holding folks accountable, possibly even hiding information.

partingshots 8y ago

The absolute hatred that this author for Silicon Valley is a little disconcerting to be honest. It’s make it difficult to take the person seriously.