I served jury duty, and the reverse happened. The plaintiffs sued a social worker, but the case revolved around things the Department of Human Services (where he worked) advised him to do, as well as things other members of the organization did independently of him.
In that case, I found it easier to decide when the question was "is this one guy responsible for everything that happened?" rather than the more complicated "is DHS as a whole responsible?"
Thanks for that perspective. I feel like we're constantly looking through the lens of "Uber is doing something shady", so projecting a large scandal onto the company is very easy. The inverse of that being that it could be quite easy for someone, Levandowski in this case, to orchestrate something for himself illegally.
> So what if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent?
I honestly can't see this as an outcome; either Uber's wrong in they completely and miserably failed due dilligence, or they're wrong in that they actively coerced [him] to create a shell company with Google assets so it could "launder" them into Uber.
We can't say for certain which it is at this point. All we know is that Uber's trying their level best not to say which by refusing discovery and worming around the issue. That alone signals to me that the preponderance of evidence bar is going to be a fairly easy one for Google to clear here. There's just too many dots that even when left unconnected draw a pretty clear picture of what happened.
Why would Uber allow discovery if they think they are already going to win?
There is nothing wrong with Uber talking to Levandowsky while he was at Google, and nothing wrong for him to do it as long as he didn't violate his NDA. If Uber said, "hey, we really want to build a strong team for self driving, you should leave Google and come here", that's totally fine as well.
It's even fine if they say "start a separate company and recruit a team, and we'll either invest or buy it".
Google has a high bar here. They have to show their assets were "laundered" into Uber. And they have to show that Uber knew it and encouraged it. In the first case they'd only have a case against Levandowsky and a very limited one against Uber. It's only in the second where Uber's liability becomes substantial.
So what happens if Uber is "innocent" and Levandowski is guitly as an individual? Seems odd that they could benefit from him stealing the tech, even if they didn't know.
It is if you happen to buy stolen property. You might not be held responsible for stealing, but you'll have to return the property and say good buy to the money, I think.
IANAL, but... They owe you and it is a question if they can get it back to you, but the rightful owner has precedence in many (most?) cases. That's the setup for many kinds of scam. The scammed party buys something, but the transaction of the property is in some way faulty, while the money quickly disappears.
The law is also going to ask hard questions about "unknowingly". If you're walking around Market St. at 11 PM and some dude stops you and tries to sell you a fancy new bike for $200, complete with a U-lock holder but no U-lock, the law is probably going to say that you should have expected it to be stolen property. If you gave the guy $200 in cash without asking any questions, you probably won't get away saying "I unknowingly purchased stolen goods".
Sure it is; that's why it's called "due diligence". You are legally required to engage in some amount of diligence when acquiring a company. As a very related example, a US company acquiring a foreign company is obligated to make sure the foreign company isn't engaged in corruption/bribery, and is expected to show a certain amount of competence in investigating the foreign company before the acquisition. Going ahead with the acquisition after an incompetent examination is illegal.
More generally, the law recognizes the concepts of negligence, reckless endangerment, a "reasonable person," the idea that you're responsible if you "knew or should have known" about some problem, etc., all of which I would classify as specific ways of stupidity and incompetence being illegal. Of course if you keep your stupidity and incompetence entirely to yourself, you're fine. But if you act stupid or incompetent in a way that affects other people or the public, chances are high that you're in legal trouble.
What does it take to get a business license revoked these days? If an individual carried on the way Uber does s/he's be looking at a long stretch in prison. While I championed Uber's disruption of the taxi monopoly when it got started, and did a lot of free advocacy here on HN against taxi industry shills, the firm has turned out to be as corrupt or worse than the market it set out to disrupt.
Should the various allegations made against the firm prove true, and and it seems like there's a good chance of that, a good number of people need to face criminal charges, the company needs to be shut down and its assets auctioned off, and the investors need to end up with nothing because they abrogated their corporate governance responsibilities.
From day one the only reason Uber was "disrupting" the taxi industry is because they blatantly ignored regulation. It should be expected for them to be equally shady in other areas if their entire business was based on breaking the law, whether you think those laws are warranted or not.
Do taxi companies leverage cozy relationships with taxi regulators to restrict competition so they can overcharges customers and increase their profits? The answer to that is almost certainly yes, and provably yes in certain markets.
Does that mean every business that is trying to break the taxi monopoly is automatically one of the good guys, and run ethically? The answer to that is almost certainly no.
You are the only person talking about mindlessly supporting something. I do not regret any of my original support for the firm, which was well-founded based on the information available, and whose existence solved a real problem in the market.
I'm totally open to punishing the execs and investors, but shutting down the company hurts the employees, drivers, and users more, so not a great outcome. A financial judgement/penalty against Uber large enough to force it into a bankruptcy and sale, force execs out, force a loss on investors, but keep it operating seems better then a shutdown.
So what? The market will fill the gap (and Uber already has credible competitors like Lyft). If that was good enough for the incumbent taxi monopolies to be disrupted despite the difficult consequences for some individuals who participated in good faith, then it is good enough for those who were misfortunate enough to get mixed up with a company that appears to have repeatedly operated in bad faith.
Corporations abuse the public and individual persons because corporate charters are hardly ever revoked. Why is there so much horror over killing off a brand that has become a byword for mendacity? Why should we glorify corporations that sweep all before them, but treat them like helpless infants when they march deliberately towards a tragic end?
I'm sure your concern for the people that work there is sincere, but realistically, they can get other jobs, although having worked for Uber might involve answering awkward questions about what they did there. Good.
There's something wrong with society where human life is considered disposable for a wide variety of reasons but the dissolution of an organization is greeted with horror. If the allegations against Uber are true, kill it.
Sure killing it would make you feel better, but once you come down from that emotional high, you realize that the "organization" didn't do anything, it's just an abstract legal concept. People at Uber did bad things, and they should be accountable. The vast majority at Uber are normal people.
Point being, organizations are not just meaningless legal abstractions. They coordinate people. An evil organization will make "normal people" do evil things, or morally-neutral things that add up to evil. In that case you absolutely want to destroy the organization itself.
This how bad act by companies get rewarded. Also, people who were not cool with Uber culture and behavior left. They would go on to work for less to brag about cool company and maybe lesser salary. If you dont punish Uber as a company, other companies will have to act more like Uber to be competitive and thus people not cool with it will have less places to be employed at.
People who leave companies like Uber due to moral considerations deserve more regard then those who stayed.
What if the market can't efficiently fill the gap because of a monopoly on some resource (whether that be physical or IP through patents)? Do we give companies that have monopolies a pass? Finding some other way to punish them might be simpler in the end.
Then we should weigh the opportunity cost against the cost of the allegedly illegal externalities.
Of course that's a bit hard to do, but would it be a great tragedy if the less efficient outcome was that for the next 10 years your ride arrived in 6 minutes rather than 5? Across a few billion rides that's a loss of efficiency, but efficiency maximization isn't the only good in life.
Meh. Two years ago, Uber and Lyft threw a tantrum about being forced to play fair and left Austin. Several competitors sprung up and filled the gap within a matter of weeks.
Rumor has it that there are other large corporations whose operations span the globe, and whose employees know the arcane formulae to command the performance of mighty forces that can summon chariots at will.
I know nothing of such worldly matters; I am but a humble priest of Eris.
Sure, the technology has a low barrier of entry but that ignores network effects (necessitating lots of cash burn) and the willpower to oppose entrenched interests such as governments and taxi groups.
Except the taxi industry in many cities is not a free market, my city in particular being #1 on both the world crony capitalist index and the world economic freedom index (Hong Kong). Uber stuck their middle finger at our regulators in a way that no other company had dared to before, at the benefit of consumers.
Going forward, I don't think we'll ever see another taxi company with the balls and cash that Uber has (or had).
Then it should be hoped that locals will be inspired by Uber's example and launch a native version.
If we're going to put our faith in markets and free enterprise, then we need to believe that the market will find a way to deal with the gap of Uber. To do otherwise is to view the organization as indispensable, which is even worse than laissez-faire market worship; it's the objectivist veneration of a producer (vs. looters), and bowing to Uber's will because we think we cannot live if it shrugs.
There are plenty of other people in this world with balls and cash.
> I'm totally open to punishing the execs and investors, but shutting down the company hurts the employees, drivers, and users more, so not a great outcome.
So?
Uber and Lyft throwing a hissy fit and leaving Austin shows that replacing them isn't actually as traumatic as you think.
And stomping the investors flat would send a nice signal that maybe you shouldn't invest in companies whose primary competitive advantage is that they break the law.
At the end of the day, however, this is all part of negotiating tactics between Uber and Google.
Thew whole point of the gig economy is that drivers can work for anyone. If Uber's bubble gets burst, they'll just shift to Lyft or whichever mushrooms pop up locally. "Won't anybody think of the drivers?" has no weight.
Uber seems to be the logical extreme of 'easier to beg forgiveness' mentality; there are no rules (explicit or implicit) or ethical boundaries that are not subject to be broken in pursuit of their goals.
I dunno man, I think Uber is just in the HN wheelhouse and has been stealing our focus lately. Wells Fargo illegally signed people up for countless credit lines they didn't ask for. HSBC got a slap on the wrist for laundering billions in drug money. People in power routinely break the rules and there's basically no penalty.
Damn, I had completely forgotten about that. Really puts Uber's shadiness in a different light. Obviously if they broke the law they should be punished, but it makes it harder to see this lawsuit as a good vs evil.
The difference is that Wells Fargo does not brag about its crooked nature nearly as much as Uber (or its sympathizers), at least on this forums. Not many people are openly sad that more companies are not more like Wells Fargo (because hackers mentality, maaan) nor them being praised as role model as Uber was.
HN is visited by people in tech who are naturally interested more in what happens with technology companies. Therefore there is more focus on Uber then on Wells Fargo.
1.) Uber was praised as role model and people tried to mimic them. That has impact on behavior or other companies and founders in tech community. Crooks being praised and rewarded means more crooks in the future.
People who think this is bad thing, wants (and have absolute right) to put attention on previously praised crooks so that opposite message (it is bad behavior and you might get punished) gets attention too.
2.) If you brag about your success and break-the-rules-strategy, people like you less and get more angry with you. Once you get caught, they get happy, talk about it and wants to see you punished more then as if you did not bragged. That is how humans work.
I agree, that rewarded bad behavior could lead others to follow. But, we have much bigger issues going on, such as the banking industry and all the mess that it has caused all the while getting rewarded for it.
Bragging isn't the problem, if what they're doing is illegal, then it should be handled accordingly. They might be thinking that they are thinking out of the box, and you might have to break some laws, but those laws are actually blocking progress. So, not necessarily a bad thing depending on the law being broken.
The media wrote good aricles about the conman who informed on Google, who claimed to be selling vials of nothing but water and labeling them "HGH" etc.
However, frankly, there are still scams being advertised on Adwords and I would argue that we should separate the scam category from the illegal pharma category.
The truth is that the vast majority of the half billion dollars they were penalized for earning was payments from companies who were advertising and fulfilling generic drugs from cheaper countries such as India (or even New Zealand!). The people running these companies may be 'criminals' -- you could make that case -- but I have an easier time making the case that they are running an ethical business that helps lower and middle class americans get the medicine they need at a fraction of the cost (and sometimes simply without explaining to a third-party that their dick doesn't work).
I would put this in the same category as Uber breaking the taxi regulations. In short, I welcome it. I find the current system of requiring prescriptions for so many drugs to be morally repugnant. I support anyone who wants to break those laws, even if they're doing it for completely selfish reasons.
> HSBC got a slap on the wrist for laundering billions in drug money.
AIUI there's no evidence that actually happened. It's more like they were marking some transactions as low-risk rather than medium-risk when they should have been following guidelines that allowed the transactions to be considered as low-risk or medium-risk, but under slightly different criteria.
There's lots of penalties, like having to spend millions in legal fees defending your billions in fraud and spending several days in a stuffy court-room trying not to trip up in your own web of lies!
I think the difference is that Wells Fargo and it's ilk already have a shit ton of money and will stop at nothing to make more. Startup philosophy generally involves breaking rules somewhere along the way, but it strikes me as so deeply ingrained into Uber's culture as to be an end in itself.
As much as I want to see an immoral company to crash and burn, the presented evidences so far have been circumstantial. There is a lack of direct evidences that Uber was stealing IP, as opposed to Levandowski.
Have you ever dealt with vendors? They'll happily "help" you design boards using solutions from their other customers. They'll let you run some sample fabs on your competitors equipment. They'll accidentally put your design docs in the same ftp folder as your competitors.
There are a lot of ways and they're more obvious than what you imply.
Since everyone basically agrees that Levandowski downloaded these files from google, Occam's Razor suggests that the guy who knowingly stole the files provided them along. Doesn't rule out a different sort of malfeasance, but certainly it's worth exploring that avenue to the fullest.
> the presented evidences so far have been circumstantial
...and that's what makes all Uber/Lev's avoidance look as damning as it is. If the stuff they're not saying cleared them, they'd present more of it - enough to make their case.
Shady stuff happens at a lot of companies, Travis pissed somebody off, probably a VP, and didn't pay them enough to keep quiet.
You know those golden parachutes that piss everyone off? They give you those in return for promising not talk about anything shady going on near the top
Based on this live tweets (https://twitter.com/CSaid) it doesn't sound like Waymo/Google is making much headway. They want to pin this on Uber, but haven't presented evidence of wrongdoing by Uber:
Judge to Waymo: U have no proof that shows a chain
of Levandowski saying to anybody here’s the
trade secrets.
Unless Waymo presents something like this, I don't see how this trial benefits them. Sure they can make a big fuss an get Levandowski kicked off self driving cars / Lidars, but that won't stop Uber from moving forward with their program.
It casts doubt/worry/issues on the legal legitimacy of Uber's tech. Employees/Researchers won't want to become embroiled in this, if they ever want to license the tech I'm sure "what about google?" will come up and need to be mitigated.
It gets Alphabet and the newly founded Waymo a lot of "free" publicity, helping to form their public image as a car company. (Wronged by the evil uber)
Maybe a little vindictive, but I'm sure their lawyers would rather his compensation burn than be used against them.
> It casts doubt/worry/issues on the legal legitimacy of Uber's tech. Employees/Researchers won't want to become embroiled in this, if they ever want to license the tech I'm sure "what about google?" will come up and need to be mitigated.
Why would an employee ever fear another entity personally suing them? Was there a mass exodus from Google or Samsung after Apple's successful infringement suit in 2012?
Why would an employee performing genuinely novel work worry about her work being discredited?
I would expect a culpable employee to divest before his organization got caught. Some members of the Enron C-suite sold their stock before the debt hiding scandal broke. Maybe this is happening in Uber's Otto division; has anyone seen anything like this?
If Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents I'm sure Google believes he stole from them and is using those docs at Uber, whether it's true or not.
He might be using those docs from his personal laptop to help build Uber's product, or he might just been doing a build at home for Google in his last days there. I don't trust that Googles lawyers descriptions (or Ubers lawyers descriptions), so it will take until the full evidence is out before we can know for sure.
> or he might just been doing a build at home for Google in his last days there.
If you look at the details of that allegation, that's not really a feasible assumption (depending on how much stock you put in the details presented). According to Google, he installed custom software to access the files, and the files where in a data store he had no normal access to. From the filing[1]:
In December 2015, Mr. Levandowski specifically searched for and then installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop in order to access the server that stores these particular files. Once Mr. Levandowski accessed this server, he downloaded the 14,000 files, representing approximately 9.7 GB of highly confidential data. Then he attached an external drive to the laptop for a period of eight hours. He installed a new operating system that would have the effect of reformatting his laptop, attempting to erase any forensic fingerprints that would show what he did with Waymo’s valuable LiDAR designs once they had been downloaded to his computer. After Mr. Levandowski wiped this laptop, he only used it for a few minutes, and then inexplicably never used it again.
That file is a document filed by Waymo. We should expect that the Waymo attorneys present their case in a manner that makes it appear that Uber and Levandowski are liable with 100% certainty.
I don't think the expert witness report necessarily demonstrates Levandowski intended to steal the Google/Waymo project files. The Goobuntu distro was installed, which necessitates a reformat from NTFS to ext4 or whatever filesystem it uses.
It sure as hell looks like Levandowski meant to steal the files, especially with his copious 5th Amendment testimony refusals, but it's possible he didn't.
Thanks for the testimony, that puts a lot of light to the specific charges. Interestingly, the access looks fairly benign without the knowledge that IP was stolen at some point (as it turned up later). With that knowledge, it's easy to see it as possibly construed to look benign. Who knows what the truth is.
A work laptop that was rarely if ever used is the device in question.
TortoiseSVN was installed to access the repo. If the laptop wasn't normally used, that's a fairly regular thing to do if you want to set up the laptop to get access legitimately.
All the data was downloaded, but reading between the lines, that's just a SVN checkout, which is going to get everything in the repo by default unless you request a specific subdirectory.
A few days later a UDB drive is attached for numerous hours.
A few days after that, another operating system is installed, and the laptop is almost never used again.
All of this can be explained away as benign, but it's also possible it was intended to look that way. This could just as easily be explained as someone trying to access thee data and obscure the fact as it could be someone trying to set up a work laptop they plan to use while away from the office for a few days when they haven't bothered for to set it up for years prior because they had no need.
This would look a lot more damning if Google was asserting that Levandowski was not supposed to have access to the SVN, or had not needed any access to it prior to this point, but unless I'm missing it, they aren't saying that (although they do a good job of making it easy to assume that).
That said, that he set up the company that would later become Otto prior to all this access (with the assurance it would not compete), and also noted to numerous people that he planned to start his own self driving car company prior to the above actions (both according to the original filing though), does cast them in a somewhat different light. That there is evidence of other people that left exporting specific documents from Drive days and/or hours prior to their departure does not look good.
Wow. After reading that testimony it doesn't look in the least bit conclusive that he copied any files at all.
Information omitted that make the testimony one that is obviously presented to do maximum damage:
0) Did Levandowsky have more than one laptop? The testimony cites a laptop he was issue for several months but connected to Google's network only three times over those months he had it. Since he worked at the company during the time, I think it is reasonable to assume that he had more than one laptop and this was one that was issued and never really used.
1) Since this laptop was never really used, it's reasonable that it would get out of date. It's possible that it was used infrequently enough that changes in security policies in the Google autoupdate software would cease to work because it missed a critical security update were a full-reinstall was the simplest path to resolution, especially for a laptop that wasn't well used with data and settings worth preserving. I've seen this situation first hand at prior employers. It especially happens when a critical security update doesn't get applied in time.
2) Was the SVN repository in question one that Levandowsky had a legitimate business need to access? Had he previously accessed that repository on a different laptop that he used more regularly?
3) How many people involved in Google's self driving car program had access to this particular repository? What percent of the self driving engineers does this represent?
4) A Transcend RDF5 card reader was attached to the laptop 3 DAYS AFTER the repository was downloaded. No mention was made about a card inserted into the reader. Was any physical volume ever mounted through the card reader. If so, what kind of physical volume was mounted and how big was it? Was it large enough to store all 9.7 GB of data in the repository? Are there any logs that show files were copied from the laptop to a storage volume, assuming one was ever attached.
5) Was this card reader ever attached to any other device owned by Google that Anthony had access to? Assuming he did attach a storage volume and assuming he did copy files, is it possible that he was just moving files from this device to another one he used? Was this possibility investigated?
6) Five files were exported to his Google Drive on one occasion and another later. The later copied file, a "weekly update", is hardly the type of file that would suggest wrongdoing for anyone whose seen the typical "weekly updates" teams at big companies write. The contents may be sensitive, but they are typically high level and contain few if any details that allow reproducibility. How were those six files accessed later and from what other devices? What's in those files and why are they sensitive/important? How can each file enable a competitor?
There are too many missing dots in that testimony to actually take it seriously, especially since it's been written to maximally insinuate wrongdoing for all three engineers listed.
After reading this testimony, my opinion is that this is absurd and should be dismissed. It's entirely too circumstantial and the forensic "expert" hardly investigated and answered questions that highly relevant to interpreting Levandowsky's actions.
There's a few things that stood out to me that you didn't address:
The noted documents that Levandowski "exported to a personal device" happened 22 and 15 days prior to his quitting without notice.
The titles of documents have no bearing on how how damaging they are. This was an assertion of what happened to those documents and when, not what their contents were and how important they were. That should come later. The names themselves should not factor for or against at this point, so it's just as bad to assume they imply innocence as that they imply guilt.
I'm not sure why you are impugning the expert's testimony, I haven't seen anything to imply they were lax in their investigations or were incorrect in their assertions. They testified as to facts they were able to ascertain as to movement of internal private documents, and only as far as they could confirm, which is exactly what they should do. How damaging those documents are and how related they are to the case at hand is for the lawyers to argue.
This is not the entirety of Google case, this is the testimony from one expert witness. How these details interact with other testimony and facts to form a narrative is the important part. A witness could testify "I know nothing" and that doesn't necessarily mean there's no case, just that the witness in question doesn't have much to add. Making an assertion that there is no case because a single witness wasn't as persuasive as you thought they should be is odd.
He installed a new operating system that would have the effect of reformatting his laptop, attempting to erase any forensic fingerprints that would show what he did with Waymo’s valuable LiDAR designs once they had been downloaded to his computer. After Mr. Levandowski wiped this laptop, he only used it for a few minutes, and then inexplicably never used it again
To the next Lewandowski: "Damn, my laptop got stolen /lost it" Meanwhile hammertime and drop peaces in tens of different trash boxes. Suspicious, but no evidence to prove anything. Stuff happens.
Yeah but the laptop might be the nail in the coffin. This and that and your laptop has been tampered with to hide evidence? Guilty. Without the laptop he would have had one less thing against. Maybe I left the laptop unattended or whatever...
Judges asking questions like this don't give previews of their thinking necessarily. Often it's because they want a lawyer to make a particular argument in open court, so that they can take that argument into consideration. They are asking questions to attempt to get all arguments stated precisely.
Levandowski is probably going to come out of this really well. Uber, not so much. Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete spinning-scanner gear, mostly from Velodyne. It's something you'd use on an experimental vehicle, not a production one. The production LIDAR systems are coming, they're all solid state, and they come from big auto parts makers like Delphi and Continental. So by the time the Uber case gets to trial, it will be moot.
Levandowski already got his money. Waymo could sue him, but what are the damages? Google isn't selling anything, so they can't show impact on their sales volume. (Neither is Uber. Uber's venture into self-driving is probably more to pump up the valuation than to provide a real service, anyway.)
I'm beginning to think that self-driving will be a feature that comes from auto parts companies. You need sensors and actuators, which come from auto parts companies. You need dashboard units, which come from auto parts companies. You need a compute unit, which is just a ruggedized computer packaged for automotive conditions, something that comes from auto parts companies. You need software, which may come from a number of sources. This may not be all that disruptive a technology.
> Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete spinning-scanner gear, mostly from Velodyne. It's something you'd use on an experimental vehicle, not a production one.
Given that (1) Google is spending a whole lot of money to protect their LIDAR technology in court, (2) Uber spent nearly half a billion dollars apparently to copy it and (3) Google (with their proprietary LIDAR) is the only company -- publicity and press releases aside -- that seems to be actively operating an autonomous fleet in the wild with reasonably few overrides, disengagements or accidents, I'm willing to bet that good LIDAR is actually more important than you're giving it credit for here.
If you bought a new Ferrari because you were tired of the old one, and someone steals your old Ferrari do you just let it go, not charge them with theft?
Maybe Google thinks they can drive a wooden stake through the vampire heart of Uber with that LIDAR claim. Perhaps they will if this turns out to be a valid claim.
I'm willing to bet that there is a ton more of technology involved in self driving vehicles than you are giving it credit for here.
Not sure why the down votes. There is a lot more technology here than one type of sensor, there ia a huge software stack. Uber clearly paid $500M because they wanted to get access to someone who had been doing it for a decade and had built that stack more than once. Whether Uber thought they were getting Google technology in the deal is the big question of the lawsuit, but it's very possible they just wanted to jumpstart their own effort by buying a team that was already up to speed.
And the other question is why would auto makers want to sell or sacrifice their production capacity so they Google can kill them?
Also, there are soy many regulations and safety rules in the industry, if they can't abolish them (with perfect tech/lobbying) old automakers will win.
>Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete spinning-scanner gear, mostly from Velodyne. It's something you'd use on an experimental vehicle, not a production one. The production LIDAR systems are coming, they're all solid state, and they come from big auto parts makers like Delphi and Continental. So by the time the Uber case gets to trial, it will be moot.
Google's LIDAR technology is obsolete? Didn't Google just come up with a new system that reduces the cost of a LIDAR system by 90% ?
The 90% cost reduction from the original $70,000 Velodyne spinning KFC bucket is still nearly 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than the expected prices for solid state lidar, which a whole bunch of companies including Velodyne are racing to develop for the mass market, which are expected to be as little as $80, though several units will be needed to provide complete coverage around a car.
I've been paying close attention, and the lowest price I've seen has been $300, and I don't believe any solid state lidar has yet to be produced at that price point, despite companies claiming they could more than a year ago.
'expected' is the key word here. Getting an esoteric new technology from a proof of concept in the lab to the mass market doesn't happen overnight, but when it does, and after it's been through a few product cycles, it tends to get cheap.
Flash LIDAR from ASC [1] works fine. DoD and Space-X have been using it for years. It costs $50K/unit because it has custom ICs made with a nonstandard InGaAs process produced in tiny quantities. The units are hand-made in Santa Barbara, CA.
Continental, the big German auto parts company, bought ASC, and is putting the technology into mass production. Continental says they can get the price way down, and they probably can.
There are also about a half dozen other flash LIDAR startups, some of which might even ship someday.
Right, technology advances over time. Not sure what you're arguing here. Nothing is on the market at a lower price point, and the conversation you jumped into was in response to someone calling LIDAR obsolete. Of course something will eventually come out which is better and cheaper, but it ain't here yet.
Velodyne has announced they'll have early production models for testing this summer, with full production before the end of the year. The lawsuit won't even be done before the technology they're fighting over is obsolete. C'mon, now. It just shows the lawsuit isn't actually about protecting some kind of invaluable trade secret, that's just a tool for punishing Levandowski and Uber for hatching this scheme.
Everything you described in the last paragraph is a commodity market other than software. The margins will be in software or the overall car brands themselves (since vehicle manufacturers are large enough to throw their weight into lowering software margins assuming there's more than one option e.g. not like Microsoft in the 90s).
Levandowski has been invoking the Fifth Amendment in this case, which is a case that he's not even a party to. That's either legal gamesmanship, or else he has a genuine fear of prison time out of this. (Alternately, it might be possible that he could lose a big chunk of money but avoid prison.)
If he comes out of this still holding a big chunk of money, but having to spend several years in prison, is that still "coming out of this really well"? In my view, no.
So, Levandowski was trying to use the 5th Amendment to prevent Uber from disclosing, during discovery, the author of a report (in Uber's possession, not Levandowski) that Uber was claiming was privileged.
There are a few issues here:
1.) 5A protections don't generally cover the production of existing documents, only testimony (statements, answering questions).
2.) 5A doesn't protect corporations, only individuals.
3.) It's (apparently, per the discussions in the various court filings on this issue) incredibly rare to try to prevent the disclosure of the metadata on a privilege log. (Basically, during discovery, if you find a document that's responsive to the discovery, but think it's privilege from being turned over, you have to provide a report of what the document is, who has it, who has ever seen it, etc. to prove that it remains privileged.).
4.) For someone who isn't a party to the lawsuit to try to assert this is incredibly unusual.
The judge basically called the whole argument bullshit. But it was all related to the document stuff, not Levandowski's testimony/deposition.
Not a lawyer, but it's my understanding there is no 5th amendment protections in a civil suit/trial. But Googles complaint frames Levandowski's behavior as criminal, so doesn't that create a reasonable fear of prosecution, and open the door to letting Levandowski use the 5th?
> Not a lawyer, but it's my understanding there is no 5th amendment protections in a civil suit/trial.
It was weirder than that. Levandowski was claiming that Uber couldn't turn information over to Google because it might incriminate Levandowski, when Levandowski wasn't one of the parties in the lawsuit. Unsurprisingly, that didn't fly.
You can assert the 5th amendment in a civil suit, if you fear potential criminal prosecution. If you couldn't, then the 5th amendment protections would essentially disappear in many cases. Many criminal offenses also give rise to civil liability. So, all that would have to happen is for the victim to sue the criminal defendant, notice his/her deposition in the civil case, and compel the criminal defendant to speak that way. Then you would suddenly have the defendant being forced to testify under oath, despite the fear of criminal prosecution.
The disruption is mostly social. We will need less parking spaces, driver's licenses will become increasingly unneeded, and car ownership will largely become something for hobbyists. Transportation will become even more a subscription, with the only exceptions air and sea travel.
Waymo's endgame here is intellectual property licensing. They're not trying to be in the business of manufacturing sensors and actuators. They're trying to be in the business of licensing software that makes a working self-driving system out of a car equipped with sensors and actuators.
"Having our hardware and software development under one roof is incredibly valuable. Our sensors are developed in close collaboration with our software experts who specialize in AI techniques like machine learning. All of our sensors — including LiDARs, vision system, and radars — are deeply integrated with the brain of our self-driving cars and specially designed for our software. A single integrated system means that all the different parts of our self-driving technology work together seamlessly. Like a person’s own five senses, our sensors are more useful and more powerful when we put them all together."
It's interesting that all the self driving software seems to be advancing at a similar rate - Google's, Volvo's, Tesla's and Mercedes seem to have some what similar performance, which I guess is because most AI research is published and people use similar techniques. At that rate there won't be one system dominating but a bunch of comparable ones probably including third party suppliers that any auto manufacturer can bolt on.
I don't know about you, but for the first couple of years at least, my primary concern when buying a self-driving car would be making sure it's advanced enough to not kill me if it hits an ice patch, not the "fluid end-to-end user experience" it offers.
I agree. I was responding to someone who thinks that will be commoditized by "auto parts companies". Whether or not that's true, safety is the most important component of the user experience of a self-driving car.
Once that's figured out, the question turns to "Am I buying the car to own? Am I calling it from a mapping application like Uber or Apple Maps? What does the car look like? What new seating arrangements are enabled without the need for a driver? How much better can the entertainment features be when built by a software company instead of a car company? Can the car tell me what's wrong with it, instead of simply illuminating the check engine light? Or better yet, automatically contact the manufacturer to set up a service appointment that works with my calendar?" Etc.
Exactly. The quality and craftmanship of the product is what should be priority (especially concerning people's very lives), the end to end should come naturally for any respectable company.
Might be a reference to the fact that Levandowski already made $100M+ selling his first company to Google. I would bet that his team got almost entirely Uber stock in the Otto acquisition and that there are vesting provisions. My reasoning?
1) It would be silly for Uber to blow through their cash that fast and
2) silly to give a new team that had only been together for a month or two a huge pile of cash they could immediately walk away with.
Nobody cares about damages; the real meat is whether or not there will be an injunction. Damages could foreseeably go into the $1 billion range; an injunction would cost uber at least an order of magnitude more than that.
An injunction against what? Designing and building autonomous cars? An injunction like that might save Uber billions of dollars. I've never bought the idea they needed their own autonomous cars. Someday someone (very likely multiple someones unless our crazy patent system interferes) will build viable autonomous cars and Uber can just buy from them.
Their ultimate success will always be based on their brand and how well they provide their service. Until the last 6 months they did an amazing job at both, they had their apps on many times more phones than any competitor, and their app works amazingly well. Now they've tarnished their brand and might be losing market share, well before the market is completely built out. that's what they should be focusing on.
Some commenter on Reddit/here said that Uber doesn't have a way to profitability, self-driving is just to keep the investor money flowing in.
But the future of cars is really like servers, not ownership, but as a service, you'll just use an app to hail a self-driving car to take you anywhere. Whoever can sell their self-driving tech to car manufacturers will win, Uber probably wants to be the infrastructure that the car companies use to manage their CaaS, and if they win the self-driving first-to-market race, they can bundle their existing fleet management service as a bundle with the tech.
But if someone else wins the self-driving tech, a car manufacturer can buy that, and either self-develop their own fleet management or buy from someone else (it's a lot simpler than self-driving tech, obviously).
I struggle to understand how a service that costs pennies to deliver that earns Uber dollars from each fare can't find a path to profitability. I think people are too hung up on the awful financials they have now, and ignore the massive buildout they are doing.
And Boeing could easily compete with United and American right now, the extra costs of hiring pilots and crews are minute for them. But it doesn't make sense on many levels. I'm pretty sure car makers will focus on making the self driving tech, and sell it to customers like Uber. Uber will have to win like car rental companies do today, brand and location. If it is installed on the most phones that will winin the near term, at least until how we use our devices entirely changes.
The exec influence goes down to the employees. Expect most mid managers and the upper hierarchy to be modelled by the top.
Then about the bottom employees. Think a minute about what employees are left in that kind of environment and the psychological baggage they might carry.
This is Ubers fault for leaving themselves open, but this will play out like a hostile takeover w/ Google upping their 6percent stake to controlling or wholly owning Uber
I assume the biggest motivation for Google is not hurting or controlling Uber but preventing this kind of thing from happening again.
I assume there are a lot of people working for Google who are experts in the tech they helped create but no longer owners of that tech. By that token, Google would really try hard to keep this sort of person from leaving with their tech.
There are a lot of people at Uber who are experts in Google tech. Why retrain engineers when another company already did it for you-- on a highly complex niche platform
I think the point that the "game player" is making is that the well-known context isn't universally considered outstanding enough to revoke a business license.
I'm saying the "well known context" is a bunch of news articles of questionable accuracy. It would be nice to at least have a court trial before killing a company so actual evidence can be offered.
And also you should establish the reasons to kill a company.
Should a company die if some of its engineers sexually harasses other employees? What if it's HR department mishandles complaints by the victims?
Should a company die if it attempts to track and eliminate fraud being committed by purposely breaking Apple App store rules?
Should a company die if it attempts to outwit regulators trying to entrap it by giving them fake information?
If you think a company should be killed, you damn well should be able to clearly elucidate the reasons for it.
It would be nice to at least have a court trial before killing a company
Yes, that is the mechanism we use for determining whether allegations of untoward behavior are true or false. Did I argue for denying or short-circuiting that process anywhere? No.
Your argument is circular, equivalent to complaining that someone can't be indicted or sued because their guilt or liability has yet to be proven at trial.
I think you understand this very well and that your skepticism is performative, meant to impress others rather than convince me. Good luck with that strategy.
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