Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

I thought The Information unlocked articles that made it to the HN front page.

This article is behind a subscribe wall, which isn't very conductive to sharing. But upon reading, it seems to be that the technology is just not capable of performing the task. The assumption that deep learning is sufficient to be able to drive a car may be a faulty one.

They are doing much more than simply deep learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8qypWV2L2g

Deep learning alone has long since been considered a faulty approach (see ALVINN), since it could produce a car that can sort of drive, but nobody knows how, and when a road rule changes you have to retrain it from scratch.

I hope someone can share the full article, but a Reddit post at least had some excerpts:

> Numerous ATG employees have privately said that nobody else at the company appeared to pay a price for the blatant mistakes that preceded the deadly collision and the fact that the units management ignored clear warning signs. For instance, a manager directly warned Meyhofer and other leaders before the collision that the unit's robotaxi prototypes were dangerous-one of them had swerved onto a Pittsburgh sidewalk and continued driving — and that the company did not terminate human backup drivers even if they repeatedly screwed up.

> In mid-2018, several months after the collision, a departing senior manager of ATG sent Khosrowshahi a 35-slide presentation outlining problems in the unit, according to a copy of the presentation that circulated across the company at the time and that The Information viewed. The document alleged that months after the collision the unit still had "inadequate" safety and testing procedures and a propensity for "theater" — celebrating what the team had designed "when we didn't yet have substance" in the form of a working prototype.

> This manager also told Khosrowshahi that the unit's software engineering team was populated by "university researchers" — a reference to the CMU lab where many Uber engineers, including Meyhofer, came from who didn't have much experience in commercializing technology for the real world.

> The former manager declined to discuss the presentation or their experience at the company with The Information. Uber has significantly upgraded its safety practices in recent years, according to Meyhofer and other employees.

> In the same time period, Uber's vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience — such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement — every one-third of a mile on average. The company's leaders had hoped the figure would fall to just one bad experience every 10 miles by fall last year, said a person with direct knowledge of the goal. One person who worked on the effort told The Information they felt the prototypes were better than the data indicated.

> Uber couldn't even get the prototype to drive a one-mile stretch between the unit's two Pittsburgh offices, with the goal of shuttling employees back and forth. Software leaders said they gave up trying because automating the route for internal use wouldn't help Uber develop software that it could apply to a broader array of routes. But other managers said the failure sent a message that Uber just couldn't pull it off.

> For his part, Meyhofer said road testing helped the unit's broader mission, including giving the team ideas on how to improve the way it configures the car's laser sensors. "Every time we do any kind of development, it shows us a lot of things we can do that will get us even better results" in the next test, he said.

> Meanwhile, the company is focusing on developing new autonomous driving software to replace the version now in its prototypes, which includes code academic researchers wrote about a decade ago. The new software, rNA, is nearly ready for testing on public roads. Meyhofer and other current and former employees said INA-which took longer to develop than originally anticipated-was a necessary upgrade to allow the company to incorporate new machine learning-related techniques that help vehicles better understand the world around them.

'The information' stories seem to always revolve around a disgruntled employee sharing internal documents that results in the most click bate worthy title possible. Its not an opinion piece its manufactured content and rumors. They have no interest in informing readers. It is just a tabloid for techies.