Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 376 posts

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

#321

Post by sitkack »

woeirua wrote: post #316
howlgarnish wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously ready and safe enough for Waymo to roll it out (and they've been a lot more conservative than Uber here). As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side…

That’s actually a high hurdle to clear. Looking at fatalities per hundreds of thousands of miles driven humans are insanely good at driving. Using the 2018 NHTSA number of 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, avg speed of 60 mph, 20 predictions per second, that equates out to an autonomous system can make a fatal mistake on average about every 120 billion predictions.

You make it sound like every mis-prediction could result in death.

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

#322

Post by shermanmccoy »

colechristensen wrote: post #220
lr4444lr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the loss of agency to machines, not the raw numbers that scares people. Why do you think so many people are unduly spooked after airline accidents due to mechanical or computer error?

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…

Yes! You can control for human risks in the tail scenarios. You can't control for the tail scenarios in AI because you don't know what on earth they are, they are a nasty surprise, thrown up by a model which, in the tail, we as engineers don't fully understand

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

#323

Post by dmitriid »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #121
st1x7 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big bets and promises for the future was all they had. Trying to be a solid profitable business in a dying industry isn't going to work out well for them.

Wait, how is ride-sharing / cabs a dying industry? People are always going to need to get from point A to point B, and if anything, the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.

> the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.

And Uber/Lyft work reliably only in urban areas. "Younger generations" will inevitably grow older and may want to move out of tiny, expensive city apartments to larger accomodations outside the city. Guess what. Public infrastructure fills the gap much better than Uber/LyfBolt do (at least in Europe).

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

#324

Post by jeffbee »

lmm wrote: post #235
dekhn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pedestrian death due to cars occurs on average every ~200 million car-driven miles. Is that really bad? (the math is based on # of US miles driven in 2017 divided by the number of car-caused pedestrian fatalities in the same year)

Motorists are IIRC the third-biggest killer of young people.

Depending on what you consider young, it's the #1 cause for ages 15-24, #2 for ages 5-14 in the US.

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

#325

Post by berdario »

bo1024 wrote: post #303
howlgarnish wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

This doesn't prove that the technology is ready or safe. It only proves that Waymo thinks it's a worthwhile gamble. This is the same place where Uber's self-driving car killed a person with no repercussions to the company.

The technology is safe:

https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...

They've been very careful about it, and they have not finished work on it, so they need to keep the same standard that they had until now.

The technology is also ready for Phoenix. The company is not yet ready for the whole world (but I have no specific insight into what's holding them back).

It's totally different from Uber.

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

#326

Post by neurostimulant »

nl wrote: post #122
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…

IBM "Midrange", aka AS/400: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i They were an interesting - but dead - sideline of computing evolution. I never used one, but they had a interesting object-based (instead of file based) operating system.

My only experience on them was interacting with some API hosted in an AS/400 via FTP protocol. Felt like I was going back to the 90s.

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

#327

Post by jocker12 »

ghaff wrote: post #36
dcolkitt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might not be their internal strategy, but that's pretty much the investment thesis of every Uber bull buying their stock at $100 billion market cap.

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…

"If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the entity that's in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber's, then Uber is no longer a thing," Kalanick said." - https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on...

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

#328

Post by cblconfederate »

lucasmullens wrote: post #115
cblconfederate wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they need Uber? There are hundreds of similar taxi apps

Hundreds? With Uber there's a car maybe 5-10 minutes away at all times, that's certainly not true with most of their competition.

Drivers are not exclusive to uber, no? There is no moat in this industry, and its going to face inevitability when it runs out of money.

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

#329

Post by bobthepanda »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #121
st1x7 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big bets and promises for the future was all they had. Trying to be a solid profitable business in a dying industry isn't going to work out well for them.

Wait, how is ride-sharing / cabs a dying industry? People are always going to need to get from point A to point B, and if anything, the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.

Are they willing to pay the actual cost, though?

I know that where I live I've started blanching at how much it actually costs to take an Uber, which is now approaching what taxis cost.

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

#330

Post by bobthepanda »

astrange wrote: post #300
Judgmentality wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railroads, telecommunications, aerospace, integrated circuits, electric power... I think a better question is when has it not worked?

Aerospace doesn’t have a monopoly except that strictly regulated industries prefer having one passenger plane manufacturer because they’re easier to watch. Nor do ICs (there’s at least four big fabs and three big CPU producers). The ones that work own moats like land or government licenses. But Uber doesn’t have that.

That's not the reason aerospace is essentially a duopoly.

The real reason is that every single aircraft development program in recent history has been late and over budget, and now aircraft development is something that costs an eyewatering billions of dollars, if not in the tens of billions of dollars at this point. Bombardier sold, Embraer tried to, and Japan, Russia, and China have all mostly sputtered on despite having well financed government backing.

To put this in perspective, 787 development cost $32B. 737MAX is expected to cost past $18B. You can't bootstrap a startup if it takes tens of billions of dollars to get a plane out of the factory.

Post reply on HN