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Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

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Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#241

Post by pmiller2 »

argonaut wrote: post #238
pmiller2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do drivers make any money while keeping the overall price less than a taxi? Factor in fuel and maintenance, and drivers are already getting pretty screwed on these platforms.

Taxi medallions used to cost hundreds of thousands (SF) to more than half a million (NYC). Nowadays they still cost tens of thousands in SF and hundreds of thousands in some areas like NYC. Also, more efficient use of time from app-based routing.

I'm not convinced. Do you have evidence that "more efficient use of time from app-based routing" actually results in drivers making more money?

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#242

Post by mrgordon »

necubi wrote: post #219
jypepin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. Way before Uber IPO'ed and started aiming at profitability next year, self-driving cars was the big thing for Uber's future. (Disclaimer, I worked at Uber 2014-18).

I'm not saying there wasn't excitement about AVs. The specific claim I'm disputing (which I've heard over and over again over the past few years) is that either company considered AVs to be the only path to profitability. The history is a bit complicated, because before the IPOs neither company was focused on profitability as a primary goal.

I agree for Lyft but Uber pretty aggressively pushed the vision as necessary for their future when they were burning so much cash on ATG.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#243

Post by howlgarnish »

cmsj wrote: post #156
dmix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nothing about this deal indicates Uber is stepping away from self driving cars. They basically structured the deal as buying stock in the company and investing $400M. Letting them focus on their core business while still having a large financial stake in AI cars. The big development is that self driving cars turned out to be an extremely hard problem which didn’t match company timelines (or potentially company bu…

"turned out"... it's been starkly obvious since day one that true self-driving is a problem that requires general intelligence to solve. All you have to do to know that is drive a car and think about what's actually required to successfully drive from A to B in the real world.

Waymo is running self-driving cars with paying passengers and no backup drivers right now in Phoenix, and last I checked we don't have general AI yet.

https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way...

Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#244

Post by CobrastanJorji »

ablekh wrote: post #129
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it when job interview pitches fall flat like that. Many years ago, I had a job offer from IBM for a class of server I wasn't familiar with. The guy explained it to me like this: "You see, desktops these days are running Linux, and mainframes are running (IBM OS something?). We represent a class of server bigger than desktops but smaller than mainframes. It's an exciting space. The desktop class of PCs are hand…

If my guess is correct, it seems that you have missed a chance to work on relatively popular AS/400 servers ... :-)

I have no idea, but the engineer I was talking to was describing the unique challenge of working with the OS, as it was the sole system compiled in that language, and how about half of the bugs they fixed were OS bugs and the other half were compiler bugs, and I ran away from there as fast as I could. This would've been somewhere around 2005, so it could've been.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#245

Post by [deleted] »

necubi wrote: post #219
jypepin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. Way before Uber IPO'ed and started aiming at profitability next year, self-driving cars was the big thing for Uber's future. (Disclaimer, I worked at Uber 2014-18).

I'm not saying there wasn't excitement about AVs. The specific claim I'm disputing (which I've heard over and over again over the past few years) is that either company considered AVs to be the only path to profitability. The history is a bit complicated, because before the IPOs neither company was focused on profitability as a primary goal.

[deleted]

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#246

Post by gotostatement »

jfoster wrote: post #234
colechristensen wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the fundamentally different kind of danger from machines. They make mistakes we can’t understand. I can understand a person being distracted, reacting slowly, not seeing me, etc. I can also mitigate this risk. Crossing the street I can make eye contact with a person and be really confident that they aren’t going to run me over. Walking in front of a robot? I have no internal model for the kind of mistakes they m…

You do develop an internal model for the behaviour of machines, though. Examples: Elevators where the doors take extremely long to close on their own. Elevators where the doors close too soon after opening. Elevators where the limb sensors are not very responsive. Cars that take a couple of tries to start in cold weather. Automatic doors that are a little bit slow to open. Etc.

but those dont happen at 60+ miles per hour

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#247

Post by jessaustin »

marcinzm wrote: post #79
ghaff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually poked into this a bit out of curiosity. Without doing deeper research than I have any interest in, indeed Kalanick never seems to have publicly said anything like "We are so f'ed without self-driving" (which would be a truly idiotic thing to do) and even made some references to the length of the transition. But he also made reference to things like Uber's growth being limited until Uber was cheaper than ow…

>And I also don't see a lot of fervent denials from Uber in this regard. Why would there be? If it's helping their stock price or even neutral to it then why deny it and risk it going down?

It seems like a narrow path to try to navigate. When a reporter prefaces a question with "Next year when you've perfected your transform-manure-into-gold machine..." it seems executives either quash that nonsense, run away screaming "I can't hear you!", or make themselves liable when the TMIG machine doesn't ever work.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#248

Post by ablekh »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #244
ablekh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my guess is correct, it seems that you have missed a chance to work on relatively popular AS/400 servers ... :-)

I have no idea, but the engineer I was talking to was describing the unique challenge of working with the OS, as it was the sole system compiled in that language, and how about half of the bugs they fixed were OS bugs and the other half were compiler bugs, and I ran away from there as fast as I could. This would've been somewhere around 2005, so it could've been.

I see. Yeah, it sounds pretty scary. Well, hopefully, the job that you have accepted instead of that one has been much better.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#249

Post by scythe »

ghaff wrote: post #217
scythe wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more durable change is the shift in social norms towards intoxicated driving being unacceptable under any circumstances. Just 40 years ago the DUI threshold was .15 and even then the penalty was light. Today it's .08 with talk of lowering it, penalties have been ramped up multiple times, and nobody sees DUI enforcement as a technicality. That's a pretty big opportunity for any firm that gets you home from the…

I don't disagree with that but is the shift in drunk driving norms really enough to shift from owning cars to taking taxis? In my experience, most people don't primarily use cars to go out drinking--including among those in a position to just take Ubers instead.

I wouldn't say that, no. Other factors might reduce car ownership, of course, but I meant only to address the larger question of Uber's potential market. Another major use case is the airport, because airport parking has become egregiously expensive and cost-cutting favors rideshare infrastructure over parking (which is a good thing land-use-wise). There's also "transit in taxi out" trips because it's cold at night and people are tired and don't want to walk/wait/transfer, which grow as public transit is expanded, another trend that is likely to continue because the reduction in air pollution from electrification makes urban areas more desirable, as well as various secular trends pointing towards urbanization that may or may not continue (some recently reversed by the covid-19 pandemic) -- environmentalism in particular seems like it won't go away.

In any case, plenty of people are enthusiastic about a world where owning cars is less popular, so it's a common refrain.

Re: Uber sells self-driving unit in deal that will push Aurora’s valuation to $10B

#250

Post by jessaustin »

howlgarnish wrote: post #243
cmsj wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"turned out"... it's been starkly obvious since day one that true self-driving is a problem that requires general intelligence to solve. All you have to do to know that is drive a car and think about what's actually required to successfully drive from A to B in the real world.

Waymo is running self-driving cars with paying passengers and no backup drivers right now in Phoenix, and last I checked we don't have general AI yet. https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way... Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'…

Something something "self-driving-complete"...
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