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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

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Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#71

Post by cyrux004 »

jowday wrote: post #12
rmason wrote: post #5

I'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted and they thought had a clue on tech. Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.

If anything, I got the impression Dan had a pretty good handle on the technical aspects of Cruise and the path forward for the company, and that the GM CEO fired him because she didn't like what she was hearing from him. Dan wanted to pursue expanding Cruise robotaxis, while Mary Barra wanted to find ways to integrate Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars - that's not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, a…

I have been keep tracking of the story as an outsider and this is my impression as well

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#72

Post by epgui »

bluGill wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I…

That doesn't sound like behaviour that is made safer just because a human is at the wheel.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#73

Post by technofiend »

reTensor wrote: post #56
rmason wrote: post #5

I'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted and they thought had a clue on tech. Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.

Kyle Vogt was removed from the CEO position in late 2018 after Cruise failed to make progress toward a number of milestones. The milestones were outlined as part of the Cruise acquisition. Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress. Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's consistent record of failure. Unfortunately,…

At least according to Tech Crunch it was because Ammann also failed to deliver something on Barra's agenda [1]:

And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand, there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent the past two years inching toward that commercialization goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone through a spate of consolidation.

Most likely that's a lot harder to get done than anyone thinks. Is Vogt really the guy to make it happen? I guess we'll find out. But GM sending an otherwise successful VP packing after more than a decade there signals they are looking to shake things up. GM is not Silicon Valley and even senior execs IMHO enjoy longer tenures that you'd find in the Valley. They also skipped over the whole reassigning him to another role / oh he's left to pursue other interests tap dancing you often see to give people some runway or cover to leave. Not sure whether to read anything into that or if that's just how Barra operates.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/16/longtime-gm-exec-dan-amman...

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#74

Post by cyrux004 »

silentsea90 wrote: post #68

Huge fan of Kyle and the Cruise team. I remember covering Cruise in a class assignment back in 2014, and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners. Ever since, they've gotten acquired (or something) and are holding up their own against behemoths in the space. Cruise's reviews on Blind are pretty bad, something that keeps me away from joining them as an employee, but I suppose…

> and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners

The good thing is we have comma.ai that works across a wide variety of vehicles.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#75

Post by jowday »

jklinger410 wrote: post #64
jowday wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume…

> You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If it is something other than all the big car companies refuse play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.

I mean, I described the reason. The other thing is that perception the way you’re thinking about it isn’t a huge problem for AVs. They’re generally able to recognize all of the objects and elements they need to from their onboard sensors. The problem is a lack of deeper understanding of what they’re seeing, not a lack of viewing angles or range. And more range/angles won’t fix that.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#76

Post by AlotOfReading »

ajross wrote: post #22
jowday wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, I got the impression Dan had a pretty good handle on the technical aspects of Cruise and the path forward for the company, and that the GM CEO fired him because she didn't like what she was hearing from him. Dan wanted to pursue expanding Cruise robotaxis, while Mary Barra wanted to find ways to integrate Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars - that's not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, a…

> [integrating] Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars [is] not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion of the stack. That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's…

Not going to give my name for obvious reasons, but formerly at Cruise. Any sufficiently complex system has lots of hidden assumptions that aren't trivial to unwind when changing problem domains. I can think of at least a few design decisions I personally made that will have to revisited for personal vehicles. It's not impossible, but still nontrivial.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#77

Post by gcheong »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31
walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't…

Yeah it has all the hallmarks of “we can build a fully automated plant - well turns out that humans are still way better at some things”. I hope they figure out if this path is a dead end, at least in the short term, or not sooner than later though.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#78

Post by nbardy »

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything.

Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the key for building model backbones that you can retrain for downstream tasks.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#79

Post by [deleted] »

technofiend wrote: post #73
reTensor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyle Vogt was removed from the CEO position in late 2018 after Cruise failed to make progress toward a number of milestones. The milestones were outlined as part of the Cruise acquisition. Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress. Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's consistent record of failure. Unfortunately,…

At least according to Tech Crunch it was because Ammann also failed to deliver something on Barra's agenda [1]: And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand, there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent the past two years inching toward that commercialization goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone through a spate of…

[deleted]

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#80

Post by kelnos »

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I do wonder if, deep down, Tesla's decision is rooted in aesthetics. The cars with all the crazy sensing equipment on them are ugly as sin. That really doesn't jive with Tesla's brand at all. A more charitable interpretation may be aerodynamics; making those worse would reduce the car's range.

Both of those reasons are of course flimsy, if true: form cannot always come before function.

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