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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#461

Post by xapata »

pj_mukh wrote: post #401
bedhead wrote: post #105

Among the circumstantial evidence, the self-funding aspect is what jumped out at me the most. This is the equivalent of a hedge fund manage buying something based on inside information, but only for his personal account. Why cut other people in on the wink-and-nod-guaranteed payday? Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."

Has there ever been an indication into what stuff was actually stolen? The only evidence I've seen so far has been of old hardware (LIDAR interface boards etc.). That's hardly anything to construct a grand buyout conspiracy about. However, if the stolen material had the results of years of training data generated from all the trial runs, that would be Google's only edge in the whole market.

It's possible that specialized hardware is also a valuable trade secret. Or perhaps simply the method of manufacturing such hardware cheaply enough to produce one for every vehicle.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#462

Post by Fricken »

mikepurvis wrote: post #425

No relationship between Uber's Ottomotto and the self-driving vehicles of OTTO Motors: https://www.ottomotors.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/o... Disclosure: employee of Clearpath, the company behind OTTO Motors.

And we don't want to confuse Otto motors or Ottomotto with Ottomatika, the CMU AV spinoff acquired by Delphi.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#463

Post by Fricken »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #445
flylib wrote: post #402

"That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just on salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard…

Where does it say Anthony Levandowski is worth hundreds of millions?

Levandowski sold 3 companies to Google for a rumoured 500 million. He then received another massive undisclosed sum for meeting benchmarks on Google's self driving car program, along with several other key team members.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#464

Post by Fricken »

computerphage wrote: post #450
alpha_squared wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't find info on Argo (not looking properly, most likely), but Cruise raised over $18m before being bought (for ???). It looks like a solid effort to launch a product/startup that was snatched up. Otto was ~6 months and bought for $680m. I think there's a pretty large delta of strangeness there.

Cruise was bought for a billion dollars. Argo got a billion dollar investment.

Argo isn't really an independent startup, Ford was behind it all along.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#465

Post by jon_richards »

thearn4 wrote: post #53
jacknoble wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drivers are going to be removed from the equation no matter what though.

I do believe that this is true, but I can't help but also believe that the timelines that the tech community has in mind are absolutely too optimistic. I think like many promising innovations (AI, VR, etc.) it will have periods of rapid innovation followed by contraction and lull, repeated many times until general adoption is realized.

You're going to have a few palm pilots before you have an iphone.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#466

Post by chris_7 »

nunez wrote: post #408
mmanfrin wrote: post #59

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

I was a Windows engineer for Google's Corp Eng PaaS SRE team and have familiarity with this topic. It's not hard to get this data or set this data collection up on a Windows domain or machine. Anyone can set this up as long as you have the TBs to collect the data and the presentation/searching layer to find it. Windows has the ability to log everything , including device installs/uninstalls, file opens/closes/creatio…

Target Disk Mode?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#467

Post by dantiberian »

xapata wrote: post #461
pj_mukh wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there ever been an indication into what stuff was actually stolen? The only evidence I've seen so far has been of old hardware (LIDAR interface boards etc.). That's hardly anything to construct a grand buyout conspiracy about. However, if the stolen material had the results of years of training data generated from all the trial runs, that would be Google's only edge in the whole market.

It's possible that specialized hardware is also a valuable trade secret. Or perhaps simply the method of manufacturing such hardware cheaply enough to produce one for every vehicle.

In the filings, Waymo claims that even the identity of a LiDAR component supplier is a trade secret (because of how long it took them to vet the different suppliers).

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#468

Post by xapata »

londons_explore wrote: post #366
muninn_ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could just buy Uber. The thing is they likely wouldn't want to own Uber, especially considering it's just burning through mega-cash.

Google has mega-cash, and is happy to burn through it if long term returns look plausible.

Perhaps even enough cash to create the dominant ride hail company from scratch.

Coca-cola was about to buy Gatorate for $13B. Buffett squashed the deal at the 11th hour and Pepsi paid $14B. Buffett presumably thought that Coca-cola could use the $13B to make its own sports drink. It's still not clear which company was wiser.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#469

Post by PhantomGremlin »

payne92 wrote: post #109

I'll be curious to see if the Uber-Otto acquisition gets strained. It's common for the acquired company to make specific "representations and warranties", particularly around IP. "We own our IP and didn't steal it" is typical, and some percentage of the deal is held back for ~1-2 years in case there is a problem. But if there's fraud, all bets are off. Does Uber throw Otto under the bus? It would be "The Uber Way", b…

Does Uber throw Otto under the bus?

My prediction is that Kalanick and Levandowski will soon be attempting to throw each other under the bus to save their own job, money, and reputation. With any luck they will both wind up under a bus.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#470

Post by im3w1l »

jimmywanger wrote: post #457
throwawaysbdi wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely that the RNG's in slots don't produce uniformly distributed wins and losses except over long timeframes. A machine that's truly random will result in everyone losing money slowly and reliably after a large number of pulls. So not fun. A machine built to have the odds wander around over a period of time will be more unpredictable with a greater earnings spread

I don't think that slots can be stateful between plays - there are extremely stringent regulations for slot machines and odds. For instance, if you advertise a 99.95% slot giveback, they will test that. Also, for video poker and card games, the wins and losses are distributed as if it were a real deck of cards shuffled between hands. There are strict regulations there too, and payout percentages based on the rules of…

Well I know that at least progressive jackpots are allowed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_jackpot There of course, the state is not hidden.
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