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Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

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Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#141

Post by fma »

amacneil wrote: post #105
Exoristos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming you meant the GM data center in Milford & Warren...

1) There were ways around it via a secure proxy for outbound

2) If proxy was blocked because of your zone, you could escalate and get deviation. Just need the right security person to approve. I've definitely launched stuff in prod and it's like whoops didn't know that would be blocked or forgot to submit to be opened.

3) Maybe you encountered a power tripping "security architect"...gotta find ways to avoid those.

4) Unfortunately in non-IT corporate, you need to not just be able to be good at engineering but good at cutting red tape to keep your team moving. It's time consuming & frustrating.

5) The in-house alternative is PCF, which is phasing out for Azure. I thought PCF was a dumb idea to start.

6) Same red tape exists for Azure :(

I'd say it's worse for security. Maybe this has changed...left GM 6 months ago. I actively refused to migrate to Azure till they worked out the kinks. I'd have to have a frankenstein solution to satisfy their policy. I.e, app is in Azure but dependent web services are internal... Azure is considered external even though it's walled off for us...but it's external and we can't connect internal stuff to it.

We had actual products to deliver and didn't have time to be guinea pigs.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#142

Post by oldgradstudent »

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…

He may be very smart and very nice, but the recent leaks from Cruise make it appear, in my opinion, closer to Theranos than to Apple.

From the leaks it is clear that safety was never the top priority at Cruise.

Few people were surprised that Cruise car seriously injured a pedestrian by unnecessarily dragging her screaming for 20' in a completely unnecessary maneuver.

I'll stand by my opinion that Cruise is not long for this world.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#143

Post by matthewfelgate »

Kyle Vogt has failed and Cruise is a catastrophe.

Fine, if you want to judge Vogt on a CEO-friendliness scale, how to scam a company into paying billions of dollars for a no return, or how to occasionally posts on Hacker News / Reddit like a "Real Human" TM then feel free to consider him/Cruise a huge success.

In the real world Cruise currently has 0 cars giving 0 people driverless rides. The game is over. The mask has been lifted. It's over. Cruise tried to expand too quickly without the technology, profitability or safety to match. And has now crashed and burned. Now, this may be controversial, but maybe the CEO of such a company bares some responsibility for that?

I know what the replies will be: shut up random poster! Vogt built a $1 Billion dollar company from his garage, that is success by anyone's standard. But by that same standard Theranos was a success, for a time... Now both are virtually worthless.

At some point we have to start judging the success of self-driving companies by their profitability not by their PR.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#144

Post by SR2Z »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #135
SR2Z wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Support every 2-5 miles" = having a human on standby to deal with a situation that might soon require human intervention. According to Kyle, speaking as himself on HN, most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_.

> most of these support events don't result in the remote operator doing _anything_ That's a utterly ridiculous statistic. If you need a human to monitor to prevent a bad result, it doesn't matter how often the human has to intervene. For example: With Tesla Autopilot, the driver doesn't have to do anything the vast majority of the time. Still, your life expectancy will be measured in days if you don't monitor it. Ev…

This is not "human monitor or the car crashes." This is "human monitor or the car might do a safe stop and block traffic."

A human driver can easily get away with the latter, and often do. A self-driving car can't, because people hold them to higher standards.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#145

Post by SR2Z »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #116
SR2Z wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Please just read on exactly what happened in the accident before making comments about irrelevant frill like the speed limit: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woman-run-autono...

I am pretty familiar with the accident. The speed limit is not irrelevant; the question should not be "did the car behave as a perfect human driver would have?"

It should be "was the eventual outcome better than what a human driver would have achieved in the same situation?"

It's not actually clear that a human driver would have done better, and given that the human driver in this incident did a hit-and-run and still hasn't been caught, assuming that is... questionable.

The safety record of these cars is actually quite good when you consider the environment and times of day they operate in.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#146

Post by conjecTech »

Animats wrote: post #133
conjecTech wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just do not understand how people can look at a company that has achieved what Cruise has with such pessimism. Successfully completing 250k autonomous rides is an extraordinarily achievement. Yes, there have been problems, but the issues that Cruise is facing today are a world away from the kinds of problems autonomous vehicles were facing even 5 years ago. The fact that there is one major incident being discussed…

For Cruise, manual remote takeover was more common than previously admitted.[1] "Every 4 to 5 miles". [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...

They aren't manual takeovers, Kyle already responded[1] to this himself and clarified that they are requests for input which themselves mostly autoresolve. This is closer to an active learning loop than humans taking over.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145062

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#147

Post by Animats »

conjecTech wrote: post #146
Animats wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Cruise, manual remote takeover was more common than previously admitted.[1] "Every 4 to 5 miles". [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...

They aren't manual takeovers, Kyle already responded[1] to this himself and clarified that they are requests for input which themselves mostly autoresolve. This is closer to an active learning loop than humans taking over. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145062

It's remote takeover of the decision-making process because the automation failed. Despite how the CEO "clarified" it.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#148

Post by minwcnt5 »

dmazzoni wrote: post #85
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…

Honestly everything about Cruise seemed awesome until they pushed to start offering driverless rides at the same time as Waymo, when obviously they weren't as far along. Whose decision was that? I'm really curious if there were internal disagreements.

My theory is the Cruise leadership created an expectation that they were ahead of Waymo, based on focusing on SF rather than Phoenix suburbs. Then Waymo rolled into SF with their 5th gen platform and progressed faster than expected, and the heat was on.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#149

Post by ohhnoodont »

modeless wrote: post #121

Cruise did exactly the wrong thing by folding under pressure and stopping all operations. Appeasing your critics simply doesn't work. The appeasement alienates your supporters while doing nothing to change the minds of your critics as is amply demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere. Cruise's cars were almost certainly not more dangerous than human driven cars. The CYA bureaucrats have taken over and there is no pl…

I like this take. The situation involving a women under a Cruise was initiated by a hit-and-run driver throwing her directly into the path of the Cruise. Given what I've seen in San Francisco, if it weren't a Cruise behind that car, there would have two hit-and-runs.

Re: Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

#150

Post by fragmede »

xstthr wrote: post #91
pc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you think the Kyles of today would join or excel in the politics at Stripe today?

ask gdb
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