
Cruise Automation, GM’s Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It - artfuldodger
http://fortune.com/cruise-automation-general-motors-driverless-cars/
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pb
This is a great quote: "Startups with no demanding customers can lose their
urgency, with development cycles dragging on for years, says Rust, who worked
at Google’s experimental research factory before joining Cruise. “We tried to
accomplish what one of the most talented teams at Google did in two years and
compress that into six months,” Vogt says."

This is one of the main reasons why "internal startups" at big companies fail.
They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over-
funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to
compounding slowness.

~~~
mdorazio
Yes, but in this particular case I would say that urgency is not the best
thing to have. When my life is on the line, I would much rather have an
autonomous driving system that was developed slowly and deliberately without
time pressure instead of one that was rushed out the door to beat a competitor
to market.

~~~
jaredhansen
This is a fair point, but don't underestimate the value of getting something
to market sooner rather than later, even for something like this.

Look at it this way: would you rather wait for five 9s against getting in a
collision of any kind, in a car you won't be able to buy for another 25 years
... or settle for four 9s, and take delivery by christmas?

I don't know enough about the odds or the effect vs speed to comment with any
confidence about whether Cruise's autonomous driving system fits this pattern
or not, but I too often see a knee-jerk "slower and safer is always better
when _LIVES_ are on the line!" reaction, and I think it's worth being careful
about whether it actually does make for a safer world.

~~~
dilemma
This is a false dichotomy and just not representative of reality.

There _can never be_ self-driving cars because the type of generalized
intelligence that would be required is impossible to achieve. The fact remains
that a computer program can only do what it is told, it cannot think. Code has
no mind.

So what the choice is between is, instead, someone (Tesla) pushing out a
falsely marketed support system that does none of the things it is believe to
be able to, and causes unnecessary deaths and injuries. And, on the other
hand, thorough testing to uncover the possibilities and limits of the
technology, to produce a reliable, usable product.

~~~
jayjay71
This is a little simplistic. Computers can do things they aren't heuristically
programmed to do - that's the basic idea behind machine learning. I've seen
some incredibly impressive robots that ran entirely on neural nets and never
failed, but because it was impossible to understand how they worked they could
only be used for demonstration purposes as guaranteeing safety was impossible.

What you seem to be referring to is true AI. I agree we are nowhere close to
anything resembling true AI, but I do believe something representative of a
computer that can "think" will appear in the coming decades.

That said, you can program a car heuristically. Statistically speaking, the
unknown unknowns are so rare that assuming it doesn't fail under expected
conditions you can guarantee it to be safer than humans. The unknown unknowns
are not the problem right now, it's just dealing with limited sensor input
(cars have a hard time "seeing" what's around them) and making sense of the
world around it.

~~~
atroyn
There is a considerable ongoing research effort in formal verification of
learned systems. Once an ML system has been trained, it becomes deterministic
and can be tested.

~~~
jayjay71
That sounds neat. Can you link me to a paper?

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Animats
Now that explains some things. The initial Cruise Automation system was lane
keeping and auto speed control, which everybody has. It was over-promoted as
full automatic driving on the Cruise web site and Youtube.[1] "Just sit back
and enjoy the ride", says the video.

The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup
for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac/CMU
technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But
GM bought anyway.

One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS.

Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of
the car, like everybody else.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI)

~~~
pb
You are watching a two year old youtube video and then confidently
extrapolating to conclude that Cruise has no tech and that GM got duped out of
a billion dollars.

~~~
revelation
Well, all they are showing is that they have no tech.

Even the photos in this article are a bunch of Chevrolet dumps charging.

~~~
flylib
there is 15+ self driving startups at the moment, GM has prolly seen all of
them and went with Cruise

~~~
jayjay71
That isn't sound logic. GM has a track record of making terrible managerial
decisions, so assuming they know best is ignoring history. The people making
the decisions haven't worked on self-driving cars and are not the best people
to judge the technology, in fact these are the very people who twice
(technically thrice, but that's another story) abandoned their own self-
driving R&D which ultimately went to Google and Delphi (and another which was
just completely thrown away).

You're also assuming that all of the other companies wanted to sell, which
isn't true.

~~~
flylib
Otto sold for 680 million to Uber in August 2016, the company started in 2015,
that's atleast one company that was willing to sell and I figure most of them
would, they all have no end game other then being acquired for the most part

[http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-
paid-680-milli...](http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-
paid-680-million-for-self-driving-truck-company-otto-for-the-tech-not-the-
trucks)

time will tell if the Cruise acquisition pays off or not

~~~
jayjay71
Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason
it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was
acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been
planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.

~~~
flylib
we will see a few more acquisitions play out in this space over the next year
or so but I do believe Google will have a hard time acquiring the companies in
the space as tons of people are jumping ship and some are even starting their
own self driving startups with prolly no intention of going back to google
like Otto

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mandeepj
> Cruise is working with GM to add autonomous-driving technology to the Bolt.

May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of
Tesla's auto pilot in Bolt.

~~~
Shivetya
I am not sure any company is going it alone, Tesla didn't create their system
on their own anymore than GM did. After reading a Motortrend article where
they tested most of the major systems it seemed most are very good at unsafe
tailgating and work only in ideal conditions.

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boznz
"Statistically speaking, most of us will never build a billion-dollar company.
We definitely won’t build two of them"

If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a
lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually
quite high.

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tardo99
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I'm virtually positive that Cruise was
just snake oil. I expect GM to trail other automakers in this area,
particularly after this acquisition. Now, to be fair, that is pretty much the
null hypothesis since GM trails in a lot of areas. But, I view the Cruise
acquisition as a confirmation of -- not a rebuttal to -- the notion that they
are far behind and will fail.

~~~
dang
> _I know I 'll get downvoted for this_

Please don't break the HN guidelines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))
by going on about getting downvoted.

Your assessment was also off base, because unsubstantive dismissals (which
your comment unfortunately is) routinely get lots of upvotes, alas.

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tardo99
Prepare for downvotes. how dare you criticize the great accomplishments of our
new startup heroes?

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here. Substantive criticism is fine; snarky meta comments
add nothing.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998)
and marked it off-topic.

Edit: it turns out you've been posting a lot of stuff like this. Please don't
post any more stuff like this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively,
or not at all.

~~~
tardo99
I'll go with "not at all." Thanks for the feedback.

