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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again
- notacanofsoda 5y agoCan someone provide more background? Did he leave the CEO position before? Who was CEO in the interim?
- jeroen 5y agoKyle Vogt, who co-founded autonomous driving company Cruise in 2013, has been named CEO. He has served as as interim CEO since December 2021 when Dan Ammann, who had been CEO since 2018, abruptly left Cruise. — https://www.therobotreport.com/cruise-co-founder-vogt-ceo-autonomous-driving-company/ https://www.therobotreport.com/cruise-co-founder-vogt-ceo-au...
- mandeepj 5y ago> abruptly left Cruise There’s more to it. The prior CEO wanted an IPO for Cruise but the GM CEO did not. So, you know how it turned out Edit -> changed gm to GM (General Motors, parent co. of Cruise) Edit 2 -> grammar correction
- gowld 5y agoWhat's a "gm CEO" ?
- mandevil 5y agoGeneral Motors, the car company that owns Cruise, has a Chief Executive Officer, Mary Barra.
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y agoThe CEO of General Motors.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoSame as an ordinary CEO but with a gene from fish oil for extra lustre? (I'm just burning karma for jokes again because it is late)
- kingforaday 5y agoGenerally asking. How does something like this get top three spot on HN? Submitted 30 mins ago and first comment 4 mins ago by a user whose only submission is this. Just curious on the mechanics.
- callesgg 5y agoLots of people upvoting in the new section. I think that ycombinator sometimes forces up their own links, but that tends to be more obviously related to them like hiring staff to various startups.
- gowld 5y ago> be more obviously related to them like hiring staff to various startups. Those are inline ads, impossible to vote or comment on.
- cma 5y agoThey should probably add the FTC ad-disclosure tag to those job posts since the companies are financially related. Or maybe they don't have to since they are related?
- heratyian 5y agomaybe if it's about a yc company?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- timy2shoes 5y agoI suspect it's because kvogt is an active member of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kvogt https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kvogt. His (long-form) insight into this will be valuable to hear.
- president 5y ago
- rmason 5y agoI'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted and they thought had a clue on tech. Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.
- jowday 5y agoIf anything, I got the impression Dan had a pretty good handle on the technical aspects of Cruise and the path forward for the company, and that the GM CEO fired him because she didn't like what she was hearing from him. Dan wanted to pursue expanding Cruise robotaxis, while Mary Barra wanted to find ways to integrate Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars - that's not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion of the stack. There was also reporting that Kyle was offered this role immediately after Dan was fired but turned it down, opting to remain interim CEO while they searched for a replacement. Looks like something has changed, or they couldn't find a suitable replacement.
- ajross 5y ago> [integrating] Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars [is] not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion of the stack. That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are. Or alternatively: a less charitable way of making the point work would be to say that Cruise's stack was a bunch of special-case hacks for specific regions and vehicles and wasn't scalable to arbitrary environments nor regular passenger cars.
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- dr_ 5y agoPrediction: This is a prelude to becoming the CEO of GM. How well it works is important to the future of the company. From what I've read (Farhad Manjoo's article in the NYTimes about the new Escalade), it seems like it's fairly impressive.
- jowday 5y agoThe ADAS system in the Escalade has nothing to do with Cruise (confusingly). It’s developed by an in-house ADAS team at GM. Unlikely Kyle wants to become CEO of GM. Until recently the message seemed to be that Cruise was going to operate as it’s own company.
- walrus01 5y agoFrom the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented that their intention is to drive down the cost of LIDAR units through economies of scale and better technology. My personal belief is that the data acquired from LIDAR representing a at-this-moment-in-time snapshot of a vehicle's surroundings is very valuable, and Cruise is probably going down the right path with this. Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene (eg: a pedestrian wearing a black or dark blue jacket who is walking a black or brown labrador retriever across an unmarked crosswalk in Seattle level mid winter rain, at night time, something I literally saw just two nights ago).
- spikels 5y agoBut obviously if it can be done with just cameras, that’s going to be the winning solution (cheaper, simpler, etc). Let’s try a diverse set of strategies and see which one wins in the real world. Nobody knows for sure at this point.
- XCSme 5y ago> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).
- siddarthd2919 5y agoNo, not with edge cases detection. In the Lidar vs Camera context - Camera depth models have a lot of room to improve
- jeffbee 5y agoLOL no, not even remotely close. ML image classifiers will decide that an otter is a bicycle with some invisible (to humans) noise injected into the chroma. And that's state-of-the-art classifiers, which Tesla does not possess.
- shrubble 5y agoI have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap.
- adamsmith143 5y ago>which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. Uber alone has a market cap nearly 3x that and they have explicitly said they will only become profitable as an autonomous taxi co. Tesla is worth nearly a Trillion on its own. Where do you get 25B from?
- jowday 5y ago> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.
- pm90 5y agoI don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it. > In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity. Well, yeah nobody said it was easy. But, it does seem like something that could work, whereas we know that fully autonomous is just not possible with the tech we have today.
- martythemaniak 5y agoYou know, I think the Vision vs LIDAR is very narrow and won't be very relevant in the long-term. If you imagine the full robotaxi stack: cars, training, simulations, back testing, data sourcing, perception, driving decisions, etc, etc, the LIDAR vs Vision concerns only one small part of the stack. Critically, LIDAR still has to be trained in the same way cameras have to - it'll give you depth information, but you still have to make it accurate decide whether some 3D blob is a person, sign, etc. LIDAR does not help you recognize street markings, interpret signs etc. That is the big question is: what is cheaper/faster: cheap sensors and more training, or more expensive sensors and less training. As LIDAR and training both get cheaper, it might not end up making much of a difference in the end. Companies will be successful based on how well they execute on the full stack and a slight edge in one area might not be enough to overcome problems elsewhere.
- ketzo 5y agoThat’s sort of like saying “the touchscreen is only one small part of the iPhone. The OS, the native apps, the camera, the App Store, app developers, hardware accessories, repair service are all part of the stack.” You’re right, but that “small part” is absolutely critical to get right. It’s what allows the rest of the stack to be built; without that cornerstone, there’s no product. There had been many attempts at touch controls for computers before the iPhone. Other smartphones were trying. None of them were remotely close to what Apple achieved with their first capacitive screen, and that began a massive change in the way people interacted with their device, and changed the world. It’s like saying your roof is only “a small part of” your house. You’re right, on some level, but without that roof, there’s not much point in a really nice kitchen.
- hnburnsy 5y agoI think that infrastructure changes and car2car communication, will also make LIDAR less necessary. Imagine if a stopped emergency vehicle could communicate to all cars, AV or not, to slow down, stop or stay out of certain lanes of traffic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 5y agoWhat's common in these names - Steve (Apple), Satya, and Kyle? They all rejected the job when it was first offered to them. It should be a case study and research topic. I think the takeaway here is - don't accept the CEO job right away; conditionally, you should be inside the company. At least that was the case with the above individuals.
- silentsea90 5y agoHuge fan of Kyle and the Cruise team. I remember covering Cruise in a class assignment back in 2014, and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners. Ever since, they've gotten acquired (or something) and are holding up their own against behemoths in the space. Cruise's reviews on Blind are pretty bad, something that keeps me away from joining them as an employee, but I suppose chaos and uncertainty is the price one pays for the ambition to achieve something as wild.
- cyrux004 5y ago> and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners The good thing is we have comma.ai that works across a wide variety of vehicles.
- silentsea90 5y agoI am not as familiar with comma's product, but in 2014, self driving tech was out there enough as an idea for startups to invest in (ie Google moonshot level dreamy), let alone build kits that would retrofit into existing cars and actually work. Thanks for sharing about comma.ai!
- AlotOfReading 5y agoAs someone who recently left, many of the complaints on blind aren't anywhere close to my personal experiences. I enjoyed the technical side (which is a bit chaotic), but the admin side is borderline antagonistic to the rest of the company. Moreover, the company is on the losing side of a power struggle with GM. The former CEO was a victim of that, seemingly as was the equity and compensation plan.
- silentsea90 5y agoCan you elaborate on the power aspect - specifically - I thought GM had a minor stake and that Kyle/former CEO etc. have controlling stake? If not, I can see that GM would run roughshod over Cruise's plans. As an aside, Cruise comp numbers on levels.fyi seem pretty reasonable so I am unsure where comp is an issue? Does it relate to refreshers?
- sanguy 5y agoCruise has been a disaster inside GM for awhile now with a lack of progress to bring Super-Cruise to all models all across the US. They have had several tenders for the data required to build out the Super-Cruise maps but these have all been a disaster as clear the critical knowledge is gone.
- jowday 5y agoConfusingly enough, Cruise has nothing to do with Super-Cruise. Super-Cruise is handled by an in-house team at GM.
- andrewia 5y agoFrom what I know, GM Super Cruise is unrelated to Cruise LLC. GM has been developing Super Cruise on their own since 2013, and the system relies on a forward-facing camera and 3 radars (front and blind spots) to navigate the road. It links the camera's lane recognition data to 3D road maps stored onboard to anticipate the road ahead. It's also restricted to limited-access roads where pedestrians aren't a concern. Cruise AVs are much different. They appear to use LIDAR, radar, and camera data to understand their surroundings including intersections, pedestrians, and road hazards.
- hnburnsy 5y agoThanks, that is confusing, was just going to ask if super cruise uses lidar. I see the answer is no. So who is the CEO of super cruise and isn't "super cruise" better than "cruise"? I see "ultra cruise" (with LIDAR) is coming soon. Geeeesh.
- kryz 5y agoCan someone help me understand why FLIR cameras are not part of the sensor set? Particularly addressing the issue of human related risk? Distance? Target data?
- MattGrommes 5y agoI was very surprised to see an Instagram post today by someone I follow who got a fully autonomous cab ride from Cruise. No safety driver or anything. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cahyk2FJsbW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cahyk2FJsbW/?utm_source=ig_we...
- iab 5y agoSnip-snap! Snip-snap! Do you have any idea what three ceo changes does to a company??
- coreyisthename 5y agoHe went to my high school. His sister is super hot. We had a thing for a few weeks. Was cool.
- iamleppert 5y agoOnly in the tech industry is it acceptable for a CEO to unilaterally make decrees about what kind of sensor to use and not provide a shred of evidence, no strategy or engineering rigor to support the decision. I’m talking about Tesla. Imagine if the Boeing CEO one day woke up and started dictating the sensor modality of aircraft to his engineers? People would think it was crazy. Because, it is.