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Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

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Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#101

Post by Rebuff5007 »

amacneil wrote: post #58

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. An…

> 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.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#102

Post by rossjudson »

vkou wrote: post #94
qgin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> Now LiDAR is much cheaper and getting cheaper by the day, but they insist on doubling down on this strategy. Meanwhile, as an occasional tesla passenger, I get to enjoy watching the car's representation of the surrounding traffic have artifacts, like: 1. Cars disappearing, re-appearing, and disappearing again. 2. Trucks and buses slowly drifting until they phase 'into' other cars when traffic is stopped at a street…

My Tesla's SquiggleVision is emphatically disconcerting. Who thought the update speeds of these displays were a good idea?

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#103

Post by paul7986 »

sroussey wrote: post #100
paul7986 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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.

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.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#104

Post by ssnistfajen »

minimaxir wrote: post #9
babl-yc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the situations similar at all. Cruise is an extremely tough spot right now after its handling of the San Francisco accident, and it's nationwide pause of testing. OpenAI has been extremely successful but is having strategic disagreements within its non-profit board.

Growing-too-fast ended up being the root cause in both cases.

Adding the words "integrity" and "honesty" to the dictionary of many tech companies could do them a lot of good, really.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#105

Post by amacneil »

Exoristos wrote: post #92
amacneil wrote: post #58

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. An…

Not Windows laptops!

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.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#106

Post by ssnistfajen »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #51
ra7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-c...

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. Oh well. Maybe next decade.

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.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#107

Post by SR2Z »

ra7 wrote: post #56
w10-1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One unfortunate accident 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.

Oh yeah, they’re definitely guilty of trying to cover it up. But I suspect Cruise was already on CA DMV’s bad books after having so many publicized issues in SF and this was just the last straw.

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.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#109

Post by SR2Z »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #106
sillysaurusx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Oh well. Maybe next decade.

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?

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#110

Post by jamestimmins »

pc wrote: post #71
amacneil wrote: post #58

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. An…

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 da…

MIT has no shortage of exceptional people; was there something that stood out about Kyle among even that crowd?
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