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.
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.
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.
Honestly everything about Cruise seemed awesome until they pushed to start offering driverless rides at the same time as Waymo, when obviously they weren't as far along.
Whose decision was that? I'm really curious if there were internal disagreements.
My theory is the Cruise leadership created an expectation that they were ahead of Waymo, based on focusing on SF rather than Phoenix suburbs. Then Waymo rolled into SF with their 5th gen platform and progressed faster than expected, and the heat was on.
Not even kidding. They gave us a tour of their enterprise datacenter in Detroit and told us that cloud infrastructure was banned. At the time they had a plan to offer a complete in-house alternative to AWS. Meanwhile getting a single outbound port opened through their corporate firewall took several months.
Assuming you meant the GM data center in Milford & Warren...
1) There were ways around it via a secure proxy for outbound
2) If proxy was blocked because of your zone, you could escalate and get deviation. Just need the right security person to approve. I've definitely launched stuff in prod and it's like whoops didn't know that would be blocked or forgot to submit to be opened.
3) Maybe you encountered a power tripping "security architect"...gotta find ways to avoid those.
4) Unfortunately in non-IT corporate, you need to not just be able to be good at engineering but good at cutting red tape to keep your team moving. It's time consuming & frustrating.
5) The in-house alternative is PCF, which is phasing out for Azure. I thought PCF was a dumb idea to start.
6) Same red tape exists for Azure :(
I'd say it's worse for security. Maybe this has changed...left GM 6 months ago. I actively refused to migrate to Azure till they worked out the kinks. I'd have to have a frankenstein solution to satisfy their policy. I.e, app is in Azure but dependent web services are internal... Azure is considered external even though it's walled off for us...but it's external and we can't connect internal stuff to it.
We had actual products to deliver and didn't have time to be guinea pigs.
Really loathed the tech bros attitude that Cruise came off I.e. trying to rapidly expand while their cars were totally not ready for prime time and showing such often in San Francisco. Trying to win the market at all costs like Uber tried which their irresponsible trying to kill it (win the market at all coss) behavior killed a pedestrian. I was afraid Cruise's similar behavior (noted many times here on HN) would prompt something similar which it did but luckily and hopefully Cruise's victim makes a full recovery.
This is not technology to ever be created and or operated with those who are tech bro minded or following tech bro mantras(i.e. fake it til u make it)! Innocent people lives are put in danger if so as we've seen with Uber and now Cruise!
And then what happened after she was hit via a hit and run?
She was hit and lodged underneath one of Cruises's robot cars on training wheels who unlike what a human would do (stop the car & help the other human being) ..it's algorithm (there's no way these robot cars can account for all the million human scenarios that a human can) executed dragging the woman to the side of the road further mangling her body.
And we know exactly who to blame. Unlike the human. And that human likely would have kept driving too. Clearly did not show the empathy that would suggest they would pull over.
As an aside, I wonder if all Waymo and Cruise vehicles will include undercar cameras in the future.
if another human is lodged under millions of drivers' cars ..you are saying 99 percent of them are going to run them over and flee? There's that many murders out there?
Further you are saying what I detest about this dumb technology ..that being ..oh once we hurt someone or killed them we will have learned something from their death and push out a software update with each person we harm or kill. Thanks for sacrificing your life for technology progress and expanding tech bros wallets.
As for Waymo they need to be strung up too if it's found out they learned something from cruise's incident and made changes. Which scarily shows they are learning as they go and more people are going to be harmed or killed.
If you don’t want death from cars, get rid of cars. Love humans more.
Two pedestrians were killed today in my home town, for example. Tens of thousands die because of cars every year, either inside them or outside them.
Automobiles are dangerous technology. Before they existed you could be in a carriage and tell the horse to go home while you passed out. Thanks to the automobile, you’ll be dead instead.
And there is no excuse of learning going on either. Just hop in cars and tens of thousands will die. Again and again and again.
Yes but not one specific entity profits from all the vehicular carnage that happens daily. Daily accidents are part of our societal experience.
More importantly Any one profiting entity Putting robot cars which they surely know aren't ready for prime time but say or act they are is beyond egregious! Such startups or companies who do such things to win this race at all cost is putting profits/market share over the safety they bang their drum about and thus such behavior willfully harms & has harmed innocent lives. Both Uber and Cruise acted as such and both now are no longer because if it!
Human beings over technology that kills everyday for me unless they've proven like Waymo's track record /behavior shows they truly are about safety first .. human beings over profits/market share. Though I'd still love to know after cruise's incident did Waymo push out a software update ..uggh if so.
> You mean the victim that got hit by a human driver that sent her flying in the air. And that human fled the scene. Hit and run.
The limited framing rhetoric you're using here is exactly why Kyle had to quit. You - like Cruise - are choosing not to communicate the full story so that Cruise looks good.
> But I hope they can maintain their Silicon Valley culture and not succumb to becoming a complete GM outpost.
Silicon valley has not shipped a successful product in the space that Cruise is in, and its quite possible no company ever will, so maybe "succumbing" to a different culture could be a good thing.
I mean, people are riding Waymos, and were riding Cruises, so while it's not broadly available, it's also not the case that nothing has been shipped. Hell, comma.ai just launched the latest version of their hardware.
He may be very smart and very nice, but the recent leaks from Cruise make it appear, in my opinion, closer to Theranos than to Apple.
From the leaks it is clear that safety was never the top priority at Cruise.
Few people were surprised that Cruise car seriously injured a pedestrian by unnecessarily dragging her screaming for 20' in a completely unnecessary maneuver.
I'll stand by my opinion that Cruise is not long for this world.
This really seems like a rose colored glasses take. Kyle promoted a move fast and break things culture. When I have talked with Cruise engineers, many of them use that exact phrase, and they are proud of it. That culture ended up breaking a women's face.
This in particular
> But I hope they can maintain their Silicon Valley culture and not succumb to becoming a complete GM outpost.
is the last thing Cruise or the AV industry needs. SV culture is suitable for cranking out CRUD apps. SV has no business trying to produce safety critical software.
> it meant GM had produced a part that failed to meet not only its own internal minimums for torque but also basic federal safety standards. For all safety-related defects, NHTSA requires auto manufacturers and part suppliers to notify the agency within five business days after learning of a flaw that could lead to an accident. GM had not.
> The documents showed that engineers first noticed the engine stalling problem way back in 2001, four years before Brooke purchased her Cobalt. What’s more, the Cobalt wasn’t the first GM car with a defective switch; that would be the 2003 Saturn Ion. Despite internal probes over the following decade that recommended changes to the key system, no changes were made. Indeed, GM appeared to double down on the bad ignition switch, integrating it into other compact cars, including the Chevy Cobalt, Chevy HHR, Pontiac Solstice, and Pontiac Pursuit.
> As it turned out, DeGiorgio’s 2006 order came four years after an email he wrote to the ignition switch manufacturer, in which he ordered the company, rather than fix the part and incur delays, to “do nothing.” The email was signed “Ray (tired of the switch from hell) DeGiorgio.”
> The report also described the disturbing pattern of disregard for the defect. This could be witnessed in gestures such as the “GM Nod”—in which GM employees affirmed the need for a plan of action, but understood no one actually intended on following through—and the “GM Salute,” described by one employee as the “crossing of the arms and pointing outward towards others, indicating the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I like this take. The situation involving a women under a Cruise was initiated by a hit-and-run driver throwing her directly into the path of the Cruise. Given what I've seen in San Francisco, if it weren't a Cruise behind that car, there would have two hit-and-runs.
> if it weren't a Cruise behind that car, there would have two hit-and-runs.
As opposed to one hit-and-run followed up by a hit-and-drag-on-tarmac. If I were that poor woman, I know which I'd rather endure: I think a human driver would have the decency to back-up first.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, maybe I’m a gatekeeper, but he just seems to fundamentally lack the credentials I would expect for the CTO of a self-driving car company. I know, startup culture, hackers, blah blah blah. But seriously - had he ever worked in the automobile industry? Shipped a major AI product? Dealt with safety-critical systems?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
I worked at Cruise (I left about 2.5 years ago) and I have the opposite impression about Kyle. Kyle was a very charismatic leader who was really in the trenches. Unlike a lot of CEOs he was really visible in the office, he would drop in on meetings if he had breaks in his calendar, he was active on Jira and Slack, etc. Even though I was just a rank-and-file engineer I was in a number of meetings with him and some of the engineers would meet with him often. It was pretty clear that he had his finger on the pulse of the company and understood what was going on in engineering in a pretty deep way.
Some of these are qualities that I could see leading to someone thinking he was "aimless" or a "confused mess", but these are also things that engender a lot of respect from employees. For better or worse his presence was very much felt by engineers, and I think everyone thought that he was very technical.
I think Kyle's departure is going to hit hard for a lot of the engineers working on onboard software. It's been reported that they are spending something like $250M/quarter so in order to keep the ship afloat they are going to need to raise funding soon. It's hard to think of a worse situation they could be fundraising in, which I assume is going to mean a massive down round, which is going to further dishearten the people working there.
> Some of these are qualities that I could see leading to someone thinking he was "aimless" or a "confused mess", but these are also things that engender a lot of respect from employees.
Respect from employees is a fickle thing. If someone can do all that you describe and still succeed as a CEO then power to them. When it comes time to choose between one or the other, I think most employees would rather an effective boss than one that seemed to understand them. Their opinion on the CEO might change rather quick were they to be laid off because the CEO just can't cut it.
It's sort of like the cool parent that's also a friend. If they can do that and effectively parent, they're better at it than me. If it comes down to being a friend to your child or parenting them, one is nice and the other is a responsibility and has major repercussions when done wrong.
What is "the pulse of the company"? Is having a bunch of meeting with people possibly multiple levels below you keeping a pulse on the business, or is it micromanaging, or focusing on an area you understand because it's easier than spending that time on an area which you understand less?
I think aCEO should have people that work under them that can actually perform the duties they were hired for. Spot checking department and employees to make sure what's being reported to the CEO is accurate is probably a very good idea, but if the CEO is spending a bunch of time in meetings with people that they've already hired others to manage, that either shows there's a severe problem in that department that requires the CEO's constant attention, or a lack of trust in the people they hired to run that department to actually do what they were hired for. Neither are signs of what you'd want to see, IMO.
This was referenced by several at the manager level as their specific complaint. They worried why he was there and not solving higher level issues the company was facing.
When I was in college in 2011 and was offered an internship to Justin.TV, Kyle had it rescinded without notifying me, almost leaving me without an internship for my junior year.
After giving me the offer ("We would like to offer an internship position to you. I'll call you today with more details.") the recruiter emailed me that Kyle wanted to talk. Since I'd already been offered the internship, I took it as a sell call to learn more about the company.
But shortly thereafter when I emailed to accept the position, the recruiter responded
> After your conversation with Kyle, we felt that we will need a more experienced intern for the projects we have. So, we are not going to pursue your application any further.
At no point had I been told—until I tried to accept the offer—that it had been rescinded.
Thankfully, I hadn't yet reached out to the other companies who had given me offers and ended up at what turned out to be a much more successful startup. But if I had done it in the other order I would have been screwed.
This was more than 12 years ago, and I still don't know what happened internally. Having worked in many startups since then, I can understand the level of dysfunction that can occur even with well-intentioned leadership.
But in any case, Kyle clearly didn't care what happened to some random college student, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth for all of these years.
> 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.
I worked with Kyle at Justin.tv. He's great. A good guy and a tremendous engineer.
Now you know someone who does, so you can stop saying that.
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.
Yes, this should not be discounted. Cruise has stunningly terrible reviews from verified employees. Based on my dataset from Blind, they were top 5% lowest ratings. Clearly morale there has been very bad, and at least since 2018.
I just do not understand how people can look at a company that has achieved what Cruise has with such pessimism. Successfully completing 250k autonomous rides is an extraordinarily achievement. Yes, there have been problems, but the issues that Cruise is facing today are a world away from the kinds of problems autonomous vehicles were facing even 5 years ago. The fact that there is one major incident being discussed and not a pile of bodies indicates just how close we are to what will undoubtedly be the largest transformation in transportation, and human productivity, in our lifetimes. Saying that they are "pretty much over" when they are one of two organizations in the world with this level of capability makes no sense to me.
They aren't manual takeovers, Kyle already responded[1] to this himself and clarified that they are requests for input which themselves mostly autoresolve. This is closer to an active learning loop than humans taking over.
You would be surprised what corporate optics can do to override real achievements. I have always been a champion of Cruise and I think what happened to them is downright suspicious.
I knew people who worked over there and didn’t have nice things to say about anyone in upper management. I actually had to tell a recruiter from Cruise who was actively trying to get me to interview, no thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Weird - this leaves out the most worrying part of the incident; the woman was pinned under the cruise vehicle and ended up being dragged under the vehicle as the vehicle started moving again.
Furthermore, Cruise attempted to cover up the fact that the car dragged the woman. Now that I refresh myself on the details of the situation, it seems you have the "cleaned" PR statement that was pushed by Cruise and had omitted the above details
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.
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.
Ah, thank you. Them not disclosing the full video from the outset was a mistake, but it’s surprising that it escalated so much. A human driver could’ve easily made the same mistake — pulling over isn’t uncommon after an accident, and there’s no way to detect someone under your car other than getting out, which is usually not very safe.
Witholding the footage was more than just a mistake. If they are being this dishonest over something that wasn't even entirely their fault, what else could they be hiding?
And no, most human drivers would easily detect a human being stuck under their vehicle within seconds.
A human driver would have probably been driving over the speed limit in this accident. All of these roads are 25 mph, and yet it's not uncommon to see traffic at 40 mph.
There's a good chance the woman would have been _killed outright_ if it hadn't been a Cruise. Are we willing to accept strange and inhuman failure modes if they overall lead to better safety than human drivers?
I am pretty familiar with the accident. The speed limit is not irrelevant; the question should not be "did the car behave as a perfect human driver would have?"
It should be "was the eventual outcome better than what a human driver would have achieved in the same situation?"
It's not actually clear that a human driver would have done better, and given that the human driver in this incident did a hit-and-run and still hasn't been caught, assuming that is... questionable.
The safety record of these cars is actually quite good when you consider the environment and times of day they operate in.
The escalation is perhaps less surprising given that it happened while Cruise had many (much smaller) traffic issues and CPUC was already significantly limiting Cruise. They were on very thin ice.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Support every 2-5 miles" = having a human on standby to deal with a situation that might soon require human intervention. According to Kyle, speaking as himself on HN, most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_.
> most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_
That's a utterly ridiculous statistic. If you need a human to monitor to prevent a bad result, it doesn't matter how often the human has to intervene.
For example: With Tesla Autopilot, the driver doesn't have to do anything the vast majority of the time. Still, your life expectancy will be measured in days if you don't monitor it.
Even if the vehicle makes completely random decisions when faced with a binary code, you could still say that 50% of the support events don't result in the remote operator doing anything.
Yeah, and unlike humans who double park, people lose their minds at an AV, hence why the company increased the number of operators.
They're also overstaffed to deal with surges - I recommend you go read the (ex) CEO's response to these claims. As the number of cars on the road goes up, the number of employees required to deal with surges increases more slowly. At some point the ratio increases from 1:20, which is where it's already at.
> Yeah, and unlike humans who double park, people lose their minds at an AV, hence why the company increased the number of operators.
Looks like they haven't increased the number of operators enough.
> They're also overstaffed to deal with surges
Are they? How are they going to handle the next bay area earthquake? Will they have enough operators for that, or are they going to block first responders all over the city?
Fortunately, this is a moot point, because it is doubtful whether they are going to survive.
> I recommend you go read the (ex) CEO's response to these claims. As the number of cars on the road goes up, the number of employees required to deal with surges increases more slowly. At some point the ratio increases from 1:20, which is where it's already at.
Nice theory. Note that the number of remote operators shocked everyone that was following Cruise. They were constantly asked about number of cars per operator, what exactly the duties of a remote operators were, etc. They always avoided these quetions, and for a good reason. It turns out this was far worse than anyone outside Cruise could have imagined.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.