
Did Uber steal Google’s intellectual property? - Fricken
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal-googles-intellectual-property
======
uptown
"One day in 2011, a Google executive named Isaac Taylor learned that, while he
was on paternity leave, Levandowski had modified the cars’ software so that he
could take them on otherwise forbidden routes. A Google executive recalls
witnessing Taylor and Levandowski shouting at each other. Levandowski told
Taylor that the only way to show him why his approach was necessary was to
take a ride together. The men, both still furious, jumped into a self-driving
Prius and headed off.

The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to
people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in
another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the
situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but
Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued
speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto
the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to
the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median.
Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid
colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that
he eventually required multiple surgeries."

These things sound like they require way more oversight before they should be
allowed on the road if a single engineer can override protections like these.

~~~
DeonPenny
That was 7 years ago. 7 years before that video ipods just came out, blogging
became a thing, and the best phone out was a razor. That was a whole
technological epoc ago.

~~~
gsich
And yet, 7 years after there are still similar problems with self-driving
cars. Don't get too hang up on dates.

~~~
CamperBob2
And several people died in _human_ -caused wrecks while you were typing that
sentence. Nobody seems too hung up on that. Not scary enough, I guess, and you
can't blame one or two large monolithic corporations for it.

Self-driving cars are one of those instances where painstaking adherence to
the precautionary principle is going to get a lot of people killed due to poor
risk modeling. This article is a great example, where the reporter has engaged
in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics to paint an incident arising from a human
driver's poor judgement as the fault of a "rogue engineer."

~~~
davidgould
> And several people died in human-caused wrecks while you were typing that
> sentence.

According to [0] 1.24 million people die in automobile related accidents
annually. This works out to 0.04 per second. Unless parent is a very slow
typist your number overstates the real toll several times.

[0] [http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic-
accid...](http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic-accidents-
kill-1-24-million-people-a-year-worldwide-wars-and-murders-0-44-million/)

Seems to be a mix of 2010 and 2014 data, but broadly speaking close enough.

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

Silicon valley in a nut shell folks. Completely disregard ethics and hey
presto a few years down the line the total fraudster you hired turns out to
have been unethical! Whodathunk!

~~~
twtw
This article made me feel nauseated. All these big name hotshots and Google
execs so full of BS they can't even manage to fire this guy.

This is what a lot of Silicon Valley has become, but it has not always been
this way and there are still some legitimate companies that that do in fact
wear clothes - mostly semiconductor companies though.

~~~
dilyevsky
How are sociopathic tendencies of higher echelons of corporate management news
to anyone? The only “newsworthy” part of it is it relates to google (which
isn’t really news to anyone who’s been on the inside). If it was abouy some
finance firm nobody would bat an eye

~~~
acdha
It’s not news in general but many people liked to pretend it wasn’t true of
Silicon Valley or at least favorite companies like Google: sure, there are
sharks in most places but we’re a strict meritocracy where only results
matter!

That’s been cracking over time as e.g. people noticed that all of the cool
stuff Google does is a sideline for selling ads, Uber is a gypsy cab company
which would fail the instant they had to comply with the law or pay for
externalities, etc. Rather than letting SV redesign the world we’re hope the
world will rein it in enough before more people are hurt.

Given how strong that self-image has been in tech culture for decades, a lot
of people are going to have strong emotions when it’s no longer possible to
maintain cognitive dissonance.

------
oldgradstudent
So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at
least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property
damage.

Everyone knew about it, everyone watched the video, but no one saw fit to
report the incident or take responsibility.

So all the claims about 10 million miles without any serious incident are,
effectively, false.

What else are they hiding? How safe these cars really are?

~~~
hnaccy
I thought I was having intense deja vu but google has this archived form two
days ago.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO6...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO631OSsJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D18223066+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab)

Does hackernews move posts around and change their timestamps?

~~~
Deimorz
I can't remember if there's a specific term for it, but I believe HN has some
way of giving a story a "second chance", which must have been used here and
seems to involve resetting the timestamps.

I don't know if this link will continue working, but if you look at it through
this view, the comment that you're replying to shows as "2 days ago":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=...](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=18223066)

But if you link to it directly, it shows as (currently) "4 hours ago":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066)

I can understand the second-chance idea, but lying about when comments were
posted is very strange.

------
tropdrop
Buried at the bottom, Levandowski's controversial world wisdom -

"The only thing that matters is the future,” [Levandowski] told me after the
civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s
entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial
Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really
matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In
technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

To what extent does this attitude represent Silicon Valley? More usefully,
could we avoid some ill-bred start-up ideas and venture capital wasted if the
attitude of Silicon Valley was changed to include just a little more care
about history?

~~~
dmitrygr
Sadly 100%. Most startups try to "disrupt" things they do not understand.
Often with predictable results.

~~~
onion2k
But occasionally with unpredictable results, which topples incumbent
corporations who refuse to innovate or reduce costs, which is why startups
succeed. In that respect maybe the startup's attitude isn't so bad.

------
xrd
The best thing about this article:

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

~~~
sonnyblarney
AI can never be God, and won't ever be 'like God to us'. Not in a billion
years.

It's funny how so many of the 'unfaithful' seem to lack the capacity for
metaphysical thought.

This guy also seems a little bit crazy, and not in the good way.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Replying to my own comment as an edit: I used 'unfaithful' in jest almost
academic sarcasm, not seriously in any way.

I am always amazed at both the narrow materialism, and hyper grandiosity of
these people.

'Starting his own religion' (especially based around technology!) is a massive
red flag ... extreme and also misplaced egoism.

This guy is a 'jump the shark' moment for the Valley.

------
deepnotderp
One of Waymo's alleged trade secrets was that they used a fiber laser. This is
well known LIDAR technology.

They also apparently think diode alingment pins are a trade secret.

In the trial they also made it seem like Waymo invented the concept of
monostatic LIDAR.

My guess as to what happened is that Waymo has nothing _solid_ on Levandowski
but he acted extremely supiciously and they hoped to find anything he had
stolen in the process of the lawsuitl

------
Animats
Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? Probably not, if it's in the
LIDAR area. Google's LIDAR is still an expensive spinning unit for
experimental vehicles. The production solution is going to be some other
technology - flash, MEMS, or something else that's more solid state.
Continental and Luminar have both demoed reasonably good automotive flash
LIDARs.

Google/Waymo may have some proprietary technology in LIDAR data reduction.
There are hints of that in Urmson's 2016 SXSW talk. Lots of people are trying
to apply machine learning to camera images, but applying it to LIDAR is
probably more likely to work. Less ambiguous data. But there's no indication
of that being an area of litigation.

I met Levandowski briefly when he was preparing for the DARPA Grand Challenge.
He was still a student at UC Berkley then. His real achievement was that,
after the DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2008, he built a self-driving car able to
cross the Bay Bridge for the Discovery Channel.[1] That's where Google got
their start in self-driving. There was not a rush, after the Grand Challenge,
to throw money at the problem.

[1] [https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-
intelligence/t...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-
intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car)

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

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

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

------
tyingq
Curious if the invalidated patents[1] make this harder to prove. I suppose
trade secrets don't have to be patents.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-
wa...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-waymo-in-
lidar-patent-battle/)

~~~
jcranmer
Patents, by definition, are not trade secrets, since they are made public.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/GVage](http://archive.is/GVage)

------
PhasmaFelis
> _he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to
> launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the
> world._

> _“If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1
> concern,” Levandowski told me._

> _Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They
> didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had
> been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the
> authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had
> contributed to the accident. Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the
> incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity
> to learn how to avoid similar mistakes. He sent colleagues an e-mail with
> video of the near-collision. Its subject line was “Prius vs. Camry.”_

God save us all from engineers with a Messiah complex who think a few boring
little lives are a small price to pay for progress.

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

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

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

------
saagarjha
> One juror, clearly a gamer, whispered to his neighbor and, as if holding a
> controller, mimed the start of a classic Nintendo cheat code: “up,” “up,”
> “down,” “down.”

This isn't the entire code, and it's normally referred to as the "Konami code"
since it appears across platforms in Konami games.

