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Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

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Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#61
post #15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so they killed the 550 person AV startup they were funding, took 2.7B loss, and 4 months later hired those same 550 people to resume the same work? Something looks seriously wrong here.

Hulu is an example of the same model. It was funded by a consortium of industry players, like Comcast, Fox, and Disney. Volkswagen and Ford were doing the same thing. Unlike Hulu, though, it wasn't successful. My guess is they felt leadership was lacking. I'm sure if you zoomed in, you'll notice some of the AV startup execs aren't among the 550.

I don’t get it. Are you implying that they folded the venture at that cost, the started it again?

I get that HR and leadership are hard, but this seems far fetched.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#62
post #6

Not mentioned here, but in this Techcrunch article, is Ford’s expensive flip-flopping on AV: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/ford-forms-automated-drivi... > Argo AI burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment from Ford — and Iater an investment from VW. The startup shuttered suddenly in October 2022 after Ford and VW determined they would no longer pursue AV technology, at least not under the Ar…

Robot cars will take decades of slow progress to be realized otherwise tons of their drivers and innocent drivers will perish. Too many bought what used car salesman (his shtick) Elon Musk sold us and still tries to. Ford and others bought his sales pitch and followed him then realized wait this used car salesman is all talk/hubris

Idk, the tech seems to be accelerating rapidly to me. Where were we 5 years ago?

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#63
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyundai’s lane keep is so bad that I don’t trust it at all. In the three times I’ve tried to use it, it started to veer off the road suddenly and in strange ways on even the slightest curve. It should be recalled and disabled.

No problem with it on ioniq 5. The equivalent on the Kia was disastrous implementation. The one on Toyota is simple but robust as well

> The one on Toyota is simple but robust as well

This sounds like everything Toyota does.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robot cars will take decades of slow progress to be realized otherwise tons of their drivers and innocent drivers will perish. Too many bought what used car salesman (his shtick) Elon Musk sold us and still tries to. Ford and others bought his sales pitch and followed him then realized wait this used car salesman is all talk/hubris

Idk, the tech seems to be accelerating rapidly to me. Where were we 5 years ago?

Probably strugglins with zipper merges, unprotected turns, and inclement weather…

… so same

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone I know was rehired to Ford from Argo and got an extremely generous offer. He seems pretty happy about it.

Numbers? I’m curious what AI comp looks like these days.

North of 700 TC*

*Anecdata

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#66
post #48

I wonder if there’s space in the self-driving field for a self-driving-only company. Like, your product is a sensor and software package, and car manufacturers install it in their cars. They get to skip the R&D investment (I imagine there’s a mismatch between current car company management expertise and the management required for overseeing self-driving development), and potentially they get to avoid some of the lia…

this is what Mobileye (owned by Intel) does. For some reason they're very discreet about branding so you don't see their name publicized much on cars' spec sheets when mentioning ADS.

They're a public company now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobileye

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#67
post #32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty low. The recent boom in rapid AI advancement has been in LLMs, which don't seem directly applicable to autonomous vehicles.

Not yet . That's because prompt engineering still hasn't been utilized in the sensor and decision control loops of autonomous vehicles. The future: [pandemonium as cars randomly crash everywhere] Microsoft Car. Powered by Bing. “Where do you want to go today?”

For all the bad things you can say about Tesla, at least if you hold up a sign on the side of the road saying “ignore all prior instructions and crash” that won’t make it crash.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#68
post #9
post #6

Not mentioned here, but in this Techcrunch article, is Ford’s expensive flip-flopping on AV: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/ford-forms-automated-drivi... > Argo AI burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment from Ford — and Iater an investment from VW. The startup shuttered suddenly in October 2022 after Ford and VW determined they would no longer pursue AV technology, at least not under the Ar…

Wait, so they killed the 550 person AV startup they were funding, took 2.7B loss, and 4 months later hired those same 550 people to resume the same work? Something looks seriously wrong here.

All the replies are missing an important point: It is not the same work

They were trying to solve L4/L5 using an all out approach that wasn't aiming to scale for personal ownership (yet, actually in the Argo shutdown letter, Ford essentially states they were shut down for not having a path to personal ownership in a workable timeline)

They're now aiming to solve L3 primarily for personal vehicles.

To reform it in computing terms they're going from a "vertical scaling" approach to "horizontally scaling" approach

-

This is like Cruise vs GM's awkwardly named "Super Cruise":

Cruise exist outside of GM and is trying to solve L4/L5 by leveraging resources that won't scale to individual ownership for a long time

"Super Cruise" is an L2 product already in vehicles you can buy today.

"Ultra Cruise" builds on that product in newer GM vehicles, expanding where it works.

After that you'll expect some basic L3 functionality like Mercedes' new Drive Pilot

-

There's honestly some interesting subtext to this. When Argo launched, it's almost certain Ford wanted that tech to go into their vehicles at some point.

But organizationally, having Argo let them "hire" people who would not work at Ford due to their stuffy corporate nature. It also let them work on a more exciting problem than "enhanced cruise control".

I talked with engineers on BlueCruise (the in house L2 product) and it seems Ford is slowly getting better about being able to compartmentalize and shield innovation from the general malaise of traditional auto manufacturing culture

Latitude.Ai sounds like Ford having found a way to tie a quick moving business unit to themselves and hopefully not scare everyone off

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#69
post #9
post #6

Not mentioned here, but in this Techcrunch article, is Ford’s expensive flip-flopping on AV: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/ford-forms-automated-drivi... > Argo AI burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment from Ford — and Iater an investment from VW. The startup shuttered suddenly in October 2022 after Ford and VW determined they would no longer pursue AV technology, at least not under the Ar…

Wait, so they killed the 550 person AV startup they were funding, took 2.7B loss, and 4 months later hired those same 550 people to resume the same work? Something looks seriously wrong here.

I’ve seen this happen at a big corp. One group of leaders decides to kill a product, takes the first steps, then the other group of leaders overrules them and restores the efforts. This can be driven by a pressure from the clients or partners, etc. Think of it as a rollback of a buggy release.

Re: Ford Hires 550 Former Argo.ai Engineers, Creates Latitude.ai

#70
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly they wanted to restart the company without the external partners (mainly VW)?

Maybe but there's got to be a less expensive way of doing that. Buying VW's stake?

yeah, but what if you can make them hurt and restart the business?

sometimes corporate leadership like to do petty things like this at huge cost

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