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Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

289 points by georgehill 3y ago

minimaxir 3y ago
The situation at Cruise is so similar to OpenAI (political removal due to prioritizing success over safety) that the coincidental timing is almost contrived. At least in this case, Vogt is doing a clear resignation on his own terms.
- babl-yc 3y ago
  I don't see the situations similar at all. Cruise is an extremely tough spot right now after its handling of the San Francisco accident, and it's nationwide pause of testing. OpenAI has been extremely successful but is having strategic disagreements within its non-profit board.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    Growing-too-fast ended up being the root cause in both cases.
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      What makes you come to that conclusion?
    - ssnistfajen 3y ago
      Adding the words "integrity" and "honesty" to the dictionary of many tech companies could do them a lot of good, really.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Is this the SF accident you mean? I hadn’t heard of it, but this seems not at all worrisome: > At approximately 9:30 p.m. on October 2, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian while traveling in the lane immediately to the left of a Cruise AV. The initial impact was severe and launched the pedestrian directly in front of the AV. The AV then braked aggressively to minimize the impact. The driver of the other vehicle fled the scene, and at the request of the police the AV was kept in place. Why was cruise under fire for this?
    - alain94040 3y ago
      You are missing what happened next, which Cruise tried to cover up.
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      The accident was one thing, but Cruise's response to regulators about the accident escalated the heat. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-gms-cruise-reviewing-regulatory-response-technology-2023-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-...
      - sillysaurusx 3y ago
        I don’t understand, but I suppose I’ll have to accept not understanding. The article vaguely gestures towards some sort of misrepresentation, but doesn’t elaborate. Thank you for pointing it out though.
        neuronerdgirl 3y ago
        They cut the video they first showed the DMV of the accident to remove the last error made by the car, which was arguably the worst aspect of the accident as far as Cruise's default behavior failures. The DMV found out about the cut segment from the news.
    - minwcnt5 3y ago
      Dig deeper, dude. I'm not sure if you're serious or being disingenuous, but the fallout over that incident has been in tech news including several HN threads for the past 6+ weeks.
    - ra7 3y ago
      https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-cruises-robotaxi-permit-in-california/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-c...
      - sillysaurusx 3y ago
  - mcmcmc 3y ago
    If you’ll excuse the tinfoil hat, the OpenAI disagreement could very well stem from a dangerous accident or near miss covered up by Altman that we just haven’t learned about yet since the board didn’t publicly state how he deceived them. And that would be pretty analogous to the Cruise situation. Anyway Altman gives me the ick, serious lizard person vibes.
    - Exoristos 3y ago
      "OpenAI ... dangerous accident." Like what, giving a freshman wrong dates for the Garfield presidency?
      - mcmcmc 3y ago
        Like giving instructions on how to mix mustard gas to a potential school shooter. Or a manual on how to kill yourself to a depressed teen. Or a blueprint for how to build a bomb to a domestic terrorist.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  In openai’s case it feels like perhaps safety is not the issue - a chatbot doesnt think and doesnt take over the world. But rater speed over quality. All chat bots released so far appeared less useful and less competent each passing month. As if there are serious product quality flaws and it takes a little bit of time to catch on.
- jsnell 3y ago
  > political removal due to prioritizing success over safety I don't really see the parallel. It seems impossible to have success in self-driving without safety. Cars that are unsafe will literally kill people, which will then kill the program as seen with Uber. The AI safety/success tradeoff seems far more nuanced. The threats are abstract, largely hypothetical, and safety seems to be directly in opposition with success. So it's easy to see why product-oriented people would feel justified in making a call to ignore or down-prioritize safety, in a way that nobody running a self-driving car program can afford to.
nyxtom 3y ago
GM is getting ready to absorb. Watch
- cheeselip420 3y ago
  Nope - it'll be sold off, with some licensing deal or some shit.
  - oldgradstudent 3y ago
    Sold to whom? Who will be willing to spend a billion or two every year with no end in sight?
    - mcmcmc 3y ago
      [dead]
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  No this will be cut off, likely it's the end. Self driving cars are extremely expensive, terrible business model, despite 20 years of promises of they still need babying by a team of humans in a tightly controlled area. Too much capital is necessary in the high interest rate environment. Waymo is probably going to die too.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    Waymo works really well though.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      What’s Waymo’s path to profitability?
      - chpatrick 3y ago
        One robotaxi driving 24/7 without a driver pays for itself in a couple of years, even if it's a Jaguar full of lidars. After that it's pure money.
stygiansonic 3y ago
Well, this was probably the best weekend to do it.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  You mean because it's Thanksgiving week and so he'll get to relax and enjoy turkey and just chill?
  - nighthawk454 3y ago
    probably because news will be overshadowed by OpenAI. although the holiday doesn't hurt
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
Apocryphon 3y ago
AI winter? More like AI blizzard.
- naveen99 3y ago
  Heatwave ?
- huytersd 3y ago
  Seems red hot though
throwawaynum2 3y ago
That's too bad. I thought Kyle was a great CEO. I felt he really kept a positive, safety oriented, and accountability mindset. It's hard to find CEOs these days that know the in's and out's of the product you're making. Usually they'll just slap someone on with an MBA that knows neither the HW nor SW, but since this was Kyle's project from the beginning, he did. Coming from some other poorly managed startups, it was refreshing to work under both a technical and non-technical leader. Not sure what the future holds for us now.
- notatoad 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - cheriot 3y ago
    Good or bad, I wouldn't publicly comment on my employer without a throwaway. Unnecessary risk.
  - onlyanamerican 3y ago
    [flagged]
- as-j 3y ago
  Kyle was a fine CTO, and these are the qualities you listed. CEO is a different role, and without any checks in pace he’s pushed the organization so hard it is where it is today. Even the incident aside, just look at the handling and drip drip of news since going from bad to worse.
tsunamifury 3y ago
I’m guessing cruise is pretty much over. What’s really unfortunate is I worked with many people who worked with Kyle and no one had a single good thing to say about him. And I’ve often heard that before with people who knew other CEOs but they kinda grudgingly admitted they did what was needed to get it done. However over and over I just heard phrases like “lost” “aimless” and “confused mess” with Kyle and it never was the “he’s an asshole but it makes the company work. It was just. He’s lost, distracted and constantly sidelined. I say all this because I actually feel for the guy. Because I know if I was CEO of a company going up against trillionare competitors I’d probably be the same way. Probably even worse. And that’s the state most CEOs are up against — completely unable no matter their skill to outmatch the largest monopolies the world has ever seen — who can simply outspend, outlast, and out do you with capital alone.
- hra5th 3y ago
  My impression is that most Cruise employees liked and respected Kyle a lot. I have seen external people with a negative opinion of him but I am surprised to see someone say they have never seen anyone with a positive opinion, I saw far more positive than negative.
  - tempsy 3y ago
    Glassdoor has a 66% approval rating for the company and ceo not exactly a stellar rating
    - freddie_mercury 3y ago
      But there's a lot of selection bias in that. Hard to know what it means without a lot more information and comparison to other companies.
      - tempsy 3y ago
        I’ve looked at plenty of glassdoor profiles. It’s low for a large company with as many ratings as it has.
cyrux004 3y ago
I am going to leave this here https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://comma-ai.medium.com/a-100x-investment-part-2-569b7141dc82 https://comma-ai.medium.com/a-100x-investment-part-2-569b714...
- broken_clock 3y ago
  How many autonomous miles has comma driven?
  - bigyikes 3y ago
    From the first article from 4 years ago: >Last month, we had 1,209 cars drive a little over 1,000,000 miles Let's say they've had zero growth since then, so 48,000,000 conservatively? Actually, from their website [1]: >100+ million miles driven and 10k users. [1]: https://comma.ai https://comma.ai
  - tmccrary55 3y ago
    [flagged]
- avrionov 3y ago
  He is probably right to some extent, but he didn't solve self driving. He left his own company claiming that the problem is solved and only the boring part was left. He also claimed that he can fix the search in Twitter, but he left after 2 months and now he is working on something else.
ra7 3y ago
To the surprise of no one. This is on the back of GM appointing a Chief Administrative Officer to “work with” the CEO after their recent controversies. One unfortunate accident (though Cruise was at fault for making it worse) has put the entire company in disarray. I suppose it’s the result of accumulation of so many minor issues in San Francisco and a lack of a strict safety culture. It feels like a repeat of Uber from a few years ago that ended with shuttering of their self driving initiative.
- w10-1 3y ago
  > One unfortunate accident I think it was covering up for the accident that caused regulators to pull the plug. If that were traced directly to the CEO, then he's out for good reason. Otherwise, the CEO likely has to take the fall anyway to satisfy regulators who want consequences for executives who don't ensure regulatory submissions are credible.
  - ra7 3y ago
    Oh yeah, they’re definitely guilty of trying to cover it up. But I suspect Cruise was already on CA DMV’s bad books after having so many publicized issues in SF and this was just the last straw.
    - SR2Z 3y ago
      Many of the "publicized" issues in SF are entirely made up; see the "Cruise blocks an ambulance" incident, which SFFD had to recant as soon as Cruise started showing video to journalists. It's a shame they tried to hide it in this situation. They could have had a relatively smooth rise if they hadn't; a few years of awkward coexistence with robot cars is a small price to pay for the benefits of (almost totally) freeing humans from the task of driving. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Cruise has still never avoidably struck a pedestrian. Even when there have been V2V crashes, the overwhelming majority were caused by poor driving from humans.
  - oulu2006 3y ago
    This^ Trust is very important and if you can't trust your CEO to do the right thing and comply with regulations you haven't got anything.
tempsy 3y ago
This is a situation where the whole e/acc stuff every Silicon Valley bigwig is shouting about got a company in trouble. Push forward at all cost, expand as fast as possible, see regulators as stifling forces not to be trusted or taken seriously. Can almost guarantee the Cruise CEO was in that circle of thought and drank the Koolaid too hard.
- cheeselip420 3y ago
  No this was more of a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation
  - tempsy 3y ago
    Hiding a video from regulators has nothing to do with faking it til you make it
    - oldgradstudent 3y ago
      It's not just hiding the video. It was mainly the content of that video. And then we had all the other leaks. That they couldn't reliably distinguish children from adults, making them (even by their overly optimistic models) more dangerous to children than humans - which is why they started operating mostly at night, when there are few children. And then it was reported they had 1.5 employees per car in operations, requiring support every 2-5 miles. Very surprising given that they've reported a disengagement every 95,000 miles last year. Cruise was a company that could not withstand transparency.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > And then it was reported they had 1.5 employees per car in operations, requiring support every 2-5 miles. Very surprising given that they've reported a disengagement every 95,000 miles last year. If true that alone should have disqualified them from being street legal.
        3y ago
ciabattabread 3y ago
So I’m assuming the review from the external law firm is complete?
m3kw9 3y ago
Maybe they resigned thinking they would partner up with Altman
seltzered_ 3y ago
An insightful article from a couple weeks ago is this: https://open.substack.com/pub/apperceptive/p/i-knew-this-was-coming https://open.substack.com/pub/apperceptive/p/i-knew-this-was... "Whether Kyle Vogt keeps his job or not is I think a secondary question. The big question is whether Cruise, trapped as it is between the inexorable demands of the capital it has taken on and the impenetrable difficulty of the remaining technical challenges of deploying their fleet commercially, has a path forward at all. " Worth noting Cruise service paused (i.e. not even supervised rides) in Austin on Nov. 15: https://youtu.be/1o1CTfsZy_k https://youtu.be/1o1CTfsZy_k
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Not sure if it's a coincidence but I feel like a lot of companies are taking advantage of the OpenAI brouhaha to release their news of major exec firings/resignations with the thought that their announcements will get buried by that bigger story. Trying to remember but there was another big firing on Friday I believe, and it felt like all the tech companies were making big C-level changes now to lessen the impact.
- JBiserkov 3y ago
  Maybe this? "Meta's head of augmented reality software stepping down" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311144
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  Meta disbanded Responsible AI team: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=0xDEAFBEAD&next=38342452 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=0xDEAFBEAD&next=3834...
amacneil 3y ago
Since there is so much negativity in this thread, let me balance it with my take as someone who worked at Cruise for 5 years (left 3 years ago). Kyle is the smartest, most technically capable, driven person I have ever had the opportunity to work for. He had a deep technical understanding of the system, a great intuition for unnecessary complexity, and a constant desire to find and resolve engineering bottlenecks. And he was deeply motivated by a goal of safety and saving lives. After the GM acquisition, he could have enjoyed an early retirement. GM were eager to give us all Windows laptops and turn us into a San Francisco outpost, just as they had done with their Sidecar acquisition. But instead, Kyle worked tirelessly to ensure we had sufficient freedom and independence to build. I know this wasn't everyone's experience with Kyle. I know plenty of people he pushed too hard and who left much earlier than I did. But for every person who burned out, there were others motivated by his energy and loved who working for him. Is Cruise over? Probably not. There are still a ton of extremely smart people working there, and they are still in possession of a world-leading AV technology (probably second only to Waymo, who had a 5 year head start). But I hope they can maintain their Silicon Valley culture and not succumb to becoming a complete GM outpost.
- xyst 3y ago
  If Cruise is the amongst the “world leading AV technology”, we are truly f’d. As a person that had to deal with Cruise vehicles on the streets, they were by far the worst.
- pc 3y ago
  I knew Kyle in college. He was extremely smart, kind, patient, and friendly. (He was a few years ahead of me; I was a random Irish freshman who had just shown up.) Looking back, he's one of the people who inspired me to get into startups. While we never ended up working together, it wasn't for lack of trying on my side -- everyone said he was phenomenal, and I tried hard to persuade him to join Stripe in the early days.
  - GlassOwAter 3y ago
    I have a company that makes terpene-infused hard candies (nothing illegal/gray area). When we started in 2016 we were soon kicked off of Stripe, because the candy was classified by them as a drug. I then learned about their strict views and how they also ban other legal products/services from using their service. That was very frustrating.
bigyikes 3y ago
Everyone laughed at Tesla for their gung-ho, vision-only approach. Only Waymo and Cruise will make it, they said. Will be very interesting to see who is left standing. Maybe Tesla will never crack self-driving, but an insolvent company definitely won't either.
- rmason 3y ago
  My first thought was that Ford and Stellantis have been given a golden opportunity to catch up. But that's only if they realize that's the case.
- qgin 3y ago
  Very few have said Tesla isn’t good at selling cars and making a profit. They’re very good at that. I don’t think many people said Tesla would go out of business. What people said was that Tesla had made the decision to go vision-only because they wanted to start selling FSD packages 8 years ago when LiDAR was very expensive to tack onto a consumer car. Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy. Meanwhile, as an occasional tesla passenger, I get to enjoy watching the car's representation of the surrounding traffic have artifacts, like: 1. Cars disappearing, re-appearing, and disappearing again. 2. Trucks and buses slowly drifting until they phase 'into' other cars when traffic is stopped at a streetlight. It's a fantastic advertisement against self-driving.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Indeed, I've watched some of those onboard videos of the model that the self driving software generates on the fly of the road around it and compared it to what is actually out there. The discrepancies are very noticeable and make you wonder what kind of quality control they have there. Bike is there. Bike disappears. A couple of seconds later bike suddenly re-appears, but much closer than before. You can't do proper trajectory planning if your environment representation isn't accurate.
xyst 3y ago
The death knell of Cruise. Personally, after CA DMV pulled their license to operate. Cruise ceased all operations in other states (particularly in TX). Their vehicles were by far the worst to deal with as both a pedestrian and driver. As a pedestrian, I have had more close calls with their vehicles compared to human drivers. They have caused unnecessary traffic jams (in Austin, TX there was an infamous incident in West Campus that took forever to clear). When their vehicles pulled over, they often did not pull over completely and thus becoming obstructions on the road. Cruise flooded the streets of DT austin at night to pump their mileage numbers as well. It was quite a common sight to see at least 2-3 cruise vehicles circling the same neighborhoods and even hogging all of the EV charging infrastructure. Good riddance. I say.
xnx 3y ago
2 prominent Google competitors really hurting from self inflicted wounds this week. OpenAI has good tech, but surprisingly disorganized management. Cruise was considered a Waymo competitor (despite having far inferior tech) may undergo some radical changes. Could Apple possibly acquire Cruise assets? Would Apple even want them? Reputational risk to Apple is huge.
- ra7 3y ago
  Apple typically doesn’t do large acquisitions though. It’s not clear they even take AVs seriously as their own in-house development has been so minimal and late.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >2 prominent Google competitors really hurting from self inflicted wounds this week I've heard it said that Musk has had an even better week, for the reasons you mentioned plus the Starship launch.
Sebguer 3y ago
Why was the submission title changed from the much more descriptive actual article headline? I have no idea who Kyle Vogt is without the context of 'co-founder and CEO'.
- dang 3y ago
  Because readers can figure this kind of thing out. It's not hard.
  - tempestn 3y ago
    But why editorialize the title to make it less descriptive? I could understand not adding that information if it wasn't there already, but it's in the article title.
  - snewman 3y ago
    Help me understand, what was gained by removing "co-founder and CEO"? The fact that readers can figure it out is not actually a statement of a benefit, it's merely an argument that the loss is bounded.
  - zzzcsgo 3y ago
    So you go away from your own rules when it fits you... Usually you are more neutral
  - hirsin 3y ago
    Given all the random, ish, folks leaving openAI at the same time, understanding the context immediately is beneficial. I assumed this was a flamey post by a rando, not dang.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gaucheries 3y ago
The TechCrunch article’s real title seems to be more descriptive: “Cruise-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigns”
ascendednormie 3y ago
[flagged]
modeless 3y ago
Cruise did exactly the wrong thing by folding under pressure and stopping all operations. Appeasing your critics simply doesn't work. The appeasement alienates your supporters while doing nothing to change the minds of your critics as is amply demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere. Cruise's cars were almost certainly not more dangerous than human driven cars. The CYA bureaucrats have taken over and there is no place for a founder at Cruise anymore. IMO Cruise's fatal mistake was choosing San Francisco. It was hubris to think that they could change the minds of a populace and government clearly set on hating everything to do with tech. There are probably a bunch of cities that would be proud to host self-driving cars, rather than antagonistic. Things could have played out differently.
- dbt00 3y ago
  Uber had huge supporters in Phoenix and that didn't save them there. Cruise did the wrong thing by lying to government regulators.
  - modeless 3y ago
    Uber folded too. They lost their founder before that happened and the whole self driving division was probably running on inertia. Clearly the new management wasn't interested because they sold it soon after.
  - bobsomers 3y ago
    > Cruise did the wrong thing by lying to government regulators. This is exactly the core problem. It wasn't the crash. Regulators expect there to be problems with new technology, but they want to do deep investigations when they happen so everyone can learn from them. This could had been a great learning moment for Cruise, the regulators, the rest of the AV industry, and the general public. But then Cruise lied to the regulators, which is a HUGE no no. They don't take kindly to industry trying to hide information like that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ohhnoodont 3y ago
avalavalkar 3y ago
Very peculiar timing with Emmett Shear becoming the interim CEO of OpenAI
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Actual title: Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigns
nojvek 3y ago
First Sam Altman, then Kyle Vogt. Is Elon Musk from Twitter/X next?
- TMWNN 3y ago
  Even those afflicted with Musk Derangement Syndrome would have to consider Musk's ownership stakes in his companies. So, no. To put another way, there is a better chance that Musk is the next OpenAI CEO.
matthewfelgate 3y ago
Kyle Vogt has failed and Cruise is a catastrophe. Fine, if you want to judge Vogt on a CEO-friendliness scale, how to scam a company into paying billions of dollars for a no return, or how to occasionally posts on Hacker News / Reddit like a "Real Human" TM then feel free to consider him/Cruise a huge success. In the real world Cruise currently has 0 cars giving 0 people driverless rides. The game is over. The mask has been lifted. It's over. Cruise tried to expand too quickly without the technology, profitability or safety to match. And has now crashed and burned. Now, this may be controversial, but maybe the CEO of such a company bares some responsibility for that? I know what the replies will be: shut up random poster! Vogt built a $1 Billion dollar company from his garage, that is success by anyone's standard. But by that same standard Theranos was a success, for a time... Now both are virtually worthless. At some point we have to start judging the success of self-driving companies by their profitability not by their PR.
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  This comes across harsher than I expected and I'm not sure I would have done much different to Vogt had I been in his position. He seems like someone I want to be friends with. I don't know the details. I just want self-driving to succeed.

289 points by georgehill 3y ago

The situation at Cruise is so similar to OpenAI (political removal due to prioritizing success over safety) that the coincidental timing is almost contrived. At least in this case, Vogt is doing a clear resignation on his own terms.

babl-yc 3y ago
I don't see the situations similar at all. Cruise is an extremely tough spot right now after its handling of the San Francisco accident, and it's nationwide pause of testing. OpenAI has been extremely successful but is having strategic disagreements within its non-profit board.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  Growing-too-fast ended up being the root cause in both cases.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    What makes you come to that conclusion?
  - ssnistfajen 3y ago
    Adding the words "integrity" and "honesty" to the dictionary of many tech companies could do them a lot of good, really.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Is this the SF accident you mean? I hadn’t heard of it, but this seems not at all worrisome: > At approximately 9:30 p.m. on October 2, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian while traveling in the lane immediately to the left of a Cruise AV. The initial impact was severe and launched the pedestrian directly in front of the AV. The AV then braked aggressively to minimize the impact. The driver of the other vehicle fled the scene, and at the request of the police the AV was kept in place. Why was cruise under fire for this?
  - alain94040 3y ago
    You are missing what happened next, which Cruise tried to cover up.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    The accident was one thing, but Cruise's response to regulators about the accident escalated the heat. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-gms-cruise-reviewing-regulatory-response-technology-2023-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-...
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      I don’t understand, but I suppose I’ll have to accept not understanding. The article vaguely gestures towards some sort of misrepresentation, but doesn’t elaborate. Thank you for pointing it out though.
      - neuronerdgirl 3y ago
        They cut the video they first showed the DMV of the accident to remove the last error made by the car, which was arguably the worst aspect of the accident as far as Cruise's default behavior failures. The DMV found out about the cut segment from the news.
  - minwcnt5 3y ago
    Dig deeper, dude. I'm not sure if you're serious or being disingenuous, but the fallout over that incident has been in tech news including several HN threads for the past 6+ weeks.
  - ra7 3y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-cruises-robotaxi-permit-in-california/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-c...
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
- mcmcmc 3y ago
  If you’ll excuse the tinfoil hat, the OpenAI disagreement could very well stem from a dangerous accident or near miss covered up by Altman that we just haven’t learned about yet since the board didn’t publicly state how he deceived them. And that would be pretty analogous to the Cruise situation. Anyway Altman gives me the ick, serious lizard person vibes.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    "OpenAI ... dangerous accident." Like what, giving a freshman wrong dates for the Garfield presidency?
    - mcmcmc 3y ago
      Like giving instructions on how to mix mustard gas to a potential school shooter. Or a manual on how to kill yourself to a depressed teen. Or a blueprint for how to build a bomb to a domestic terrorist.
gumballindie 3y ago
In openai’s case it feels like perhaps safety is not the issue - a chatbot doesnt think and doesnt take over the world. But rater speed over quality. All chat bots released so far appeared less useful and less competent each passing month. As if there are serious product quality flaws and it takes a little bit of time to catch on.
jsnell 3y ago
> political removal due to prioritizing success over safety I don't really see the parallel. It seems impossible to have success in self-driving without safety. Cars that are unsafe will literally kill people, which will then kill the program as seen with Uber. The AI safety/success tradeoff seems far more nuanced. The threats are abstract, largely hypothetical, and safety seems to be directly in opposition with success. So it's easy to see why product-oriented people would feel justified in making a call to ignore or down-prioritize safety, in a way that nobody running a self-driving car program can afford to.

nyxtom 3y ago

GM is getting ready to absorb. Watch

cheeselip420 3y ago
Nope - it'll be sold off, with some licensing deal or some shit.
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  Sold to whom? Who will be willing to spend a billion or two every year with no end in sight?
  - mcmcmc 3y ago
    [dead]
monero-xmr 3y ago
No this will be cut off, likely it's the end. Self driving cars are extremely expensive, terrible business model, despite 20 years of promises of they still need babying by a team of humans in a tightly controlled area. Too much capital is necessary in the high interest rate environment. Waymo is probably going to die too.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Waymo works really well though.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    What’s Waymo’s path to profitability?
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      One robotaxi driving 24/7 without a driver pays for itself in a couple of years, even if it's a Jaguar full of lidars. After that it's pure money.

stygiansonic 3y ago

Well, this was probably the best weekend to do it.

khazhoux 3y ago
You mean because it's Thanksgiving week and so he'll get to relax and enjoy turkey and just chill?
- nighthawk454 3y ago
  probably because news will be overshadowed by OpenAI. although the holiday doesn't hurt
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

Apocryphon 3y ago

AI winter? More like AI blizzard.

naveen99 3y ago
Heatwave ?
huytersd 3y ago
Seems red hot though

throwawaynum2 3y ago

That's too bad. I thought Kyle was a great CEO. I felt he really kept a positive, safety oriented, and accountability mindset. It's hard to find CEOs these days that know the in's and out's of the product you're making. Usually they'll just slap someone on with an MBA that knows neither the HW nor SW, but since this was Kyle's project from the beginning, he did. Coming from some other poorly managed startups, it was refreshing to work under both a technical and non-technical leader. Not sure what the future holds for us now.

notatoad 3y ago
[flagged]
- cheriot 3y ago
  Good or bad, I wouldn't publicly comment on my employer without a throwaway. Unnecessary risk.
- onlyanamerican 3y ago
  [flagged]
as-j 3y ago
Kyle was a fine CTO, and these are the qualities you listed. CEO is a different role, and without any checks in pace he’s pushed the organization so hard it is where it is today. Even the incident aside, just look at the handling and drip drip of news since going from bad to worse.

tsunamifury 3y ago

I’m guessing cruise is pretty much over. What’s really unfortunate is I worked with many people who worked with Kyle and no one had a single good thing to say about him. And I’ve often heard that before with people who knew other CEOs but they kinda grudgingly admitted they did what was needed to get it done. However over and over I just heard phrases like “lost” “aimless” and “confused mess” with Kyle and it never was the “he’s an asshole but it makes the company work. It was just. He’s lost, distracted and constantly sidelined. I say all this because I actually feel for the guy. Because I know if I was CEO of a company going up against trillionare competitors I’d probably be the same way. Probably even worse. And that’s the state most CEOs are up against — completely unable no matter their skill to outmatch the largest monopolies the world has ever seen — who can simply outspend, outlast, and out do you with capital alone.

hra5th 3y ago
My impression is that most Cruise employees liked and respected Kyle a lot. I have seen external people with a negative opinion of him but I am surprised to see someone say they have never seen anyone with a positive opinion, I saw far more positive than negative.
- tempsy 3y ago
  Glassdoor has a 66% approval rating for the company and ceo not exactly a stellar rating
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    But there's a lot of selection bias in that. Hard to know what it means without a lot more information and comparison to other companies.
    - tempsy 3y ago
      I’ve looked at plenty of glassdoor profiles. It’s low for a large company with as many ratings as it has.

cyrux004 3y ago

I am going to leave this here https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-1/ https://comma-ai.medium.com/a-100x-investment-part-2-569b7141dc82 https://comma-ai.medium.com/a-100x-investment-part-2-569b714...

broken_clock 3y ago
How many autonomous miles has comma driven?
- bigyikes 3y ago
  From the first article from 4 years ago: >Last month, we had 1,209 cars drive a little over 1,000,000 miles Let's say they've had zero growth since then, so 48,000,000 conservatively? Actually, from their website [1]: >100+ million miles driven and 10k users. [1]: https://comma.ai https://comma.ai
- tmccrary55 3y ago
  [flagged]
avrionov 3y ago
He is probably right to some extent, but he didn't solve self driving. He left his own company claiming that the problem is solved and only the boring part was left. He also claimed that he can fix the search in Twitter, but he left after 2 months and now he is working on something else.

ra7 3y ago

To the surprise of no one. This is on the back of GM appointing a Chief Administrative Officer to “work with” the CEO after their recent controversies. One unfortunate accident (though Cruise was at fault for making it worse) has put the entire company in disarray. I suppose it’s the result of accumulation of so many minor issues in San Francisco and a lack of a strict safety culture. It feels like a repeat of Uber from a few years ago that ended with shuttering of their self driving initiative.

w10-1 3y ago
> One unfortunate accident I think it was covering up for the accident that caused regulators to pull the plug. If that were traced directly to the CEO, then he's out for good reason. Otherwise, the CEO likely has to take the fall anyway to satisfy regulators who want consequences for executives who don't ensure regulatory submissions are credible.
- ra7 3y ago
  Oh yeah, they’re definitely guilty of trying to cover it up. But I suspect Cruise was already on CA DMV’s bad books after having so many publicized issues in SF and this was just the last straw.
  - SR2Z 3y ago
    Many of the "publicized" issues in SF are entirely made up; see the "Cruise blocks an ambulance" incident, which SFFD had to recant as soon as Cruise started showing video to journalists. It's a shame they tried to hide it in this situation. They could have had a relatively smooth rise if they hadn't; a few years of awkward coexistence with robot cars is a small price to pay for the benefits of (almost totally) freeing humans from the task of driving. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Cruise has still never avoidably struck a pedestrian. Even when there have been V2V crashes, the overwhelming majority were caused by poor driving from humans.
- oulu2006 3y ago
  This^ Trust is very important and if you can't trust your CEO to do the right thing and comply with regulations you haven't got anything.

tempsy 3y ago

This is a situation where the whole e/acc stuff every Silicon Valley bigwig is shouting about got a company in trouble. Push forward at all cost, expand as fast as possible, see regulators as stifling forces not to be trusted or taken seriously. Can almost guarantee the Cruise CEO was in that circle of thought and drank the Koolaid too hard.

cheeselip420 3y ago
No this was more of a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation
- tempsy 3y ago
  Hiding a video from regulators has nothing to do with faking it til you make it
  - oldgradstudent 3y ago
    It's not just hiding the video. It was mainly the content of that video. And then we had all the other leaks. That they couldn't reliably distinguish children from adults, making them (even by their overly optimistic models) more dangerous to children than humans - which is why they started operating mostly at night, when there are few children. And then it was reported they had 1.5 employees per car in operations, requiring support every 2-5 miles. Very surprising given that they've reported a disengagement every 95,000 miles last year. Cruise was a company that could not withstand transparency.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > And then it was reported they had 1.5 employees per car in operations, requiring support every 2-5 miles. Very surprising given that they've reported a disengagement every 95,000 miles last year. If true that alone should have disqualified them from being street legal.
      - 3y ago

ciabattabread 3y ago

So I’m assuming the review from the external law firm is complete?

m3kw9 3y ago

Maybe they resigned thinking they would partner up with Altman

seltzered_ 3y ago

An insightful article from a couple weeks ago is this: https://open.substack.com/pub/apperceptive/p/i-knew-this-was-coming https://open.substack.com/pub/apperceptive/p/i-knew-this-was... "Whether Kyle Vogt keeps his job or not is I think a secondary question. The big question is whether Cruise, trapped as it is between the inexorable demands of the capital it has taken on and the impenetrable difficulty of the remaining technical challenges of deploying their fleet commercially, has a path forward at all. " Worth noting Cruise service paused (i.e. not even supervised rides) in Austin on Nov. 15: https://youtu.be/1o1CTfsZy_k https://youtu.be/1o1CTfsZy_k

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Not sure if it's a coincidence but I feel like a lot of companies are taking advantage of the OpenAI brouhaha to release their news of major exec firings/resignations with the thought that their announcements will get buried by that bigger story. Trying to remember but there was another big firing on Friday I believe, and it felt like all the tech companies were making big C-level changes now to lessen the impact.

JBiserkov 3y ago
Maybe this? "Meta's head of augmented reality software stepping down" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311144
0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
Meta disbanded Responsible AI team: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=0xDEAFBEAD&next=38342452 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=0xDEAFBEAD&next=3834...

amacneil 3y ago

Since there is so much negativity in this thread, let me balance it with my take as someone who worked at Cruise for 5 years (left 3 years ago). Kyle is the smartest, most technically capable, driven person I have ever had the opportunity to work for. He had a deep technical understanding of the system, a great intuition for unnecessary complexity, and a constant desire to find and resolve engineering bottlenecks. And he was deeply motivated by a goal of safety and saving lives. After the GM acquisition, he could have enjoyed an early retirement. GM were eager to give us all Windows laptops and turn us into a San Francisco outpost, just as they had done with their Sidecar acquisition. But instead, Kyle worked tirelessly to ensure we had sufficient freedom and independence to build. I know this wasn't everyone's experience with Kyle. I know plenty of people he pushed too hard and who left much earlier than I did. But for every person who burned out, there were others motivated by his energy and loved who working for him. Is Cruise over? Probably not. There are still a ton of extremely smart people working there, and they are still in possession of a world-leading AV technology (probably second only to Waymo, who had a 5 year head start). But I hope they can maintain their Silicon Valley culture and not succumb to becoming a complete GM outpost.

xyst 3y ago
If Cruise is the amongst the “world leading AV technology”, we are truly f’d. As a person that had to deal with Cruise vehicles on the streets, they were by far the worst.
pc 3y ago
I knew Kyle in college. He was extremely smart, kind, patient, and friendly. (He was a few years ahead of me; I was a random Irish freshman who had just shown up.) Looking back, he's one of the people who inspired me to get into startups. While we never ended up working together, it wasn't for lack of trying on my side -- everyone said he was phenomenal, and I tried hard to persuade him to join Stripe in the early days.
- GlassOwAter 3y ago
  I have a company that makes terpene-infused hard candies (nothing illegal/gray area). When we started in 2016 we were soon kicked off of Stripe, because the candy was classified by them as a drug. I then learned about their strict views and how they also ban other legal products/services from using their service. That was very frustrating.

bigyikes 3y ago

Everyone laughed at Tesla for their gung-ho, vision-only approach. Only Waymo and Cruise will make it, they said. Will be very interesting to see who is left standing. Maybe Tesla will never crack self-driving, but an insolvent company definitely won't either.

rmason 3y ago
My first thought was that Ford and Stellantis have been given a golden opportunity to catch up. But that's only if they realize that's the case.
qgin 3y ago
Very few have said Tesla isn’t good at selling cars and making a profit. They’re very good at that. I don’t think many people said Tesla would go out of business. What people said was that Tesla had made the decision to go vision-only because they wanted to start selling FSD packages 8 years ago when LiDAR was very expensive to tack onto a consumer car. Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy.
- vkou 3y ago
  > Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy. Meanwhile, as an occasional tesla passenger, I get to enjoy watching the car's representation of the surrounding traffic have artifacts, like: 1. Cars disappearing, re-appearing, and disappearing again. 2. Trucks and buses slowly drifting until they phase 'into' other cars when traffic is stopped at a streetlight. It's a fantastic advertisement against self-driving.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Indeed, I've watched some of those onboard videos of the model that the self driving software generates on the fly of the road around it and compared it to what is actually out there. The discrepancies are very noticeable and make you wonder what kind of quality control they have there. Bike is there. Bike disappears. A couple of seconds later bike suddenly re-appears, but much closer than before. You can't do proper trajectory planning if your environment representation isn't accurate.

xyst 3y ago

The death knell of Cruise. Personally, after CA DMV pulled their license to operate. Cruise ceased all operations in other states (particularly in TX). Their vehicles were by far the worst to deal with as both a pedestrian and driver. As a pedestrian, I have had more close calls with their vehicles compared to human drivers. They have caused unnecessary traffic jams (in Austin, TX there was an infamous incident in West Campus that took forever to clear). When their vehicles pulled over, they often did not pull over completely and thus becoming obstructions on the road. Cruise flooded the streets of DT austin at night to pump their mileage numbers as well. It was quite a common sight to see at least 2-3 cruise vehicles circling the same neighborhoods and even hogging all of the EV charging infrastructure. Good riddance. I say.

xnx 3y ago

2 prominent Google competitors really hurting from self inflicted wounds this week. OpenAI has good tech, but surprisingly disorganized management. Cruise was considered a Waymo competitor (despite having far inferior tech) may undergo some radical changes. Could Apple possibly acquire Cruise assets? Would Apple even want them? Reputational risk to Apple is huge.

ra7 3y ago
Apple typically doesn’t do large acquisitions though. It’s not clear they even take AVs seriously as their own in-house development has been so minimal and late.
TMWNN 3y ago
>2 prominent Google competitors really hurting from self inflicted wounds this week I've heard it said that Musk has had an even better week, for the reasons you mentioned plus the Starship launch.

Sebguer 3y ago

Why was the submission title changed from the much more descriptive actual article headline? I have no idea who Kyle Vogt is without the context of 'co-founder and CEO'.

dang 3y ago
Because readers can figure this kind of thing out. It's not hard.
- tempestn 3y ago
  But why editorialize the title to make it less descriptive? I could understand not adding that information if it wasn't there already, but it's in the article title.
- snewman 3y ago
  Help me understand, what was gained by removing "co-founder and CEO"? The fact that readers can figure it out is not actually a statement of a benefit, it's merely an argument that the loss is bounded.
- zzzcsgo 3y ago
  So you go away from your own rules when it fits you... Usually you are more neutral
- hirsin 3y ago
  Given all the random, ish, folks leaving openAI at the same time, understanding the context immediately is beneficial. I assumed this was a flamey post by a rando, not dang.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gaucheries 3y ago

The TechCrunch article’s real title seems to be more descriptive: “Cruise-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigns”

ascendednormie 3y ago

[flagged]

modeless 3y ago

Cruise did exactly the wrong thing by folding under pressure and stopping all operations. Appeasing your critics simply doesn't work. The appeasement alienates your supporters while doing nothing to change the minds of your critics as is amply demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere. Cruise's cars were almost certainly not more dangerous than human driven cars. The CYA bureaucrats have taken over and there is no place for a founder at Cruise anymore. IMO Cruise's fatal mistake was choosing San Francisco. It was hubris to think that they could change the minds of a populace and government clearly set on hating everything to do with tech. There are probably a bunch of cities that would be proud to host self-driving cars, rather than antagonistic. Things could have played out differently.

dbt00 3y ago
Uber had huge supporters in Phoenix and that didn't save them there. Cruise did the wrong thing by lying to government regulators.
- modeless 3y ago
  Uber folded too. They lost their founder before that happened and the whole self driving division was probably running on inertia. Clearly the new management wasn't interested because they sold it soon after.
- bobsomers 3y ago
  > Cruise did the wrong thing by lying to government regulators. This is exactly the core problem. It wasn't the crash. Regulators expect there to be problems with new technology, but they want to do deep investigations when they happen so everyone can learn from them. This could had been a great learning moment for Cruise, the regulators, the rest of the AV industry, and the general public. But then Cruise lied to the regulators, which is a HUGE no no. They don't take kindly to industry trying to hide information like that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ohhnoodont 3y ago

avalavalkar 3y ago

Very peculiar timing with Emmett Shear becoming the interim CEO of OpenAI

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Actual title: Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt resigns

nojvek 3y ago

First Sam Altman, then Kyle Vogt. Is Elon Musk from Twitter/X next?

TMWNN 3y ago
Even those afflicted with Musk Derangement Syndrome would have to consider Musk's ownership stakes in his companies. So, no. To put another way, there is a better chance that Musk is the next OpenAI CEO.

matthewfelgate 3y ago

Kyle Vogt has failed and Cruise is a catastrophe. Fine, if you want to judge Vogt on a CEO-friendliness scale, how to scam a company into paying billions of dollars for a no return, or how to occasionally posts on Hacker News / Reddit like a "Real Human" TM then feel free to consider him/Cruise a huge success. In the real world Cruise currently has 0 cars giving 0 people driverless rides. The game is over. The mask has been lifted. It's over. Cruise tried to expand too quickly without the technology, profitability or safety to match. And has now crashed and burned. Now, this may be controversial, but maybe the CEO of such a company bares some responsibility for that? I know what the replies will be: shut up random poster! Vogt built a $1 Billion dollar company from his garage, that is success by anyone's standard. But by that same standard Theranos was a success, for a time... Now both are virtually worthless. At some point we have to start judging the success of self-driving companies by their profitability not by their PR.

matthewfelgate 3y ago
This comes across harsher than I expected and I'm not sure I would have done much different to Vogt had I been in his position. He seems like someone I want to be friends with. I don't know the details. I just want self-driving to succeed.