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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

#361

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

howlgarnish wrote: post #333
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious question is, why does this work in Phoenix? Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic. You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input constructio…

Waymo has been dealing with construction since day one. If the road is entirely blocked, Google Maps/Waze is already capable of changing routes on the fly. There will always be corner cases that automation can't deal with, but Waymo will have some human troubleshooters around for that. So do us humans, for that matter: when a car breaks down, most people call the mechanic instead of applying their own general intelli…

What’s the mechanism?

Eg A road is accessible from 5am to 8pm. Outside those times traffic conditions change. Humans setup cones and control the flow of traffic. 2 lanes becomes 1 lane for all traffic. And traffic is managed so that depending on what direction you’re going, your driving against the normal flow of traffic.

This is a real scenario in a moderately busy area. Times may be wrong. The road is not blocked. But you have to take direction from a person. In fact this sort of temporary traffic change is fairly common especially due to road works.

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

#362

Post by bagacrap »

beoberha wrote: post #174
bagacrap wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once self driving arrives, the network effect is a lot less prominent, since the supply side can more easily be scaled

And when are self driving cars going to start driving themselves around and pick people up? Certainly not within 5 years.

Isn't it already happening in Arizona?

OK, giving Uber 5 more years is pessimistic, but whenever self driving does arrive, what will Uber's value prop be?

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

#363

Post by ablekh »

KMag wrote: post #335
ablekh wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, by "relatively popular" I meant that AS/400 servers (aka AS400 or IBM iSeries or IBM System i: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i ) have been quite popular mostly only within certain industries and/or niches (e.g., banking, insurance, manufacturing, supply chain). They are still widely used there for legacy reasons, however demand for AS/400 developers (which implies proficiency in RPG language, since,…

I wouldn't want to work on the AS/400 systems, but its Technology-Independent Machine Interface (TIMI) was basically Android Runtime decades before flip phones were even a thing: ship all of your userspace binaries as bytecode, and compile that bytecode to optimized machine code for your CPU at program installation time.

That's quite fascinating. I appreciate your comment.

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

#364

Post by jocker12 »

necubi wrote: post #17
thesimon wrote: post #6

Wasn't Uber's whole money losing strategy based on the vision that one day they'll use their self-driving cars to get the driving done for cheaper?

No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)

"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

#365

Post by jocker12 »

thesimon wrote: post #6

Wasn't Uber's whole money losing strategy based on the vision that one day they'll use their self-driving cars to get the driving done for cheaper?

When you look at the numbers, you actually see how Uber actually paid Aurora to take ATG.

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

#366

Post by bobthepanda »

swyx wrote: post #336
bobthepanda wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cost is fine if you don't take one every day, which in a remote work world is not at all a stretch

but that would effectively limit Uber to a smaller, pre-Uber sized market. Which would probably be news to investors.

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

#367

Post by pishpash »

jessaustin wrote: post #254
pishpash wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about subsidies as a business model so much as a war of capital attrition with weaker competitors, which is necessarily not endless.

Current competitors may go out of business. If there really is a niche, however, seeing off current competitors won't be the end of it. There's always someone else, who may not have burned so much VC. The other option is that there will never be a sustainable business here.

If so then why would VC's fund new competitors? The answer is they would not. VC's may throw their free money at new unquantifiable opportunities, but for this niche the financials will have become well known. In other words there would be less risk premium.

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

#368

Post by colechristensen »

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.

Powered doors are one dimensional machines with perhaps one binary sensor and a motor driver, a person could implement a state of the set automatic door in an afternoon.

You would also have to be rather clever in order to get an automatic door to injure you.

A car is also a rather easily understood dynamic system, but that isn’t an issue either. We are all quite frequently in the position of being at between a few seconds and one heartbeat away from a car killing us... walking down a sidewalk, crossing the street, driving on the highway...

We understand pretty well the dynamics of a human driver. Even the drivers that make terrible mistakes we understand something of hope and why.

A robot driver though... the terrible mistakes it makes are mysterious and terrifying. They make the kinds of mistakes a human never would (and few mistakes a human would make).

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

#369

Post by jessaustin »

pishpash wrote: post #367
jessaustin wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current competitors may go out of business. If there really is a niche, however, seeing off current competitors won't be the end of it. There's always someone else, who may not have burned so much VC. The other option is that there will never be a sustainable business here.

If so then why would VC's fund new competitors? The answer is they would not. VC's may throw their free money at new unquantifiable opportunities, but for this niche the financials will have become well known. In other words there would be less risk premium.

VCs are looking for firms who can build "moats", i.e. commercial positions within markets that have built-in advantages against potential competitors. Sometimes this is some technological feat that is difficult to match, like Uber have been promising. Other times this is unethical business practices, like paying employees less than minimum wage. Such moats may not last very long, but the concept appeals to VCs.

The phrase "war of capital attrition", however, will send capable VCs running for the exits. If they liked that sort of thing they would have been bankers.

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

#370

Post by DennisP »

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.

Not human-level AI, though. Plenty of animals do fine with challenging navigational problems. Birds fly through forests, catch or evade other birds, cross continents, etc.
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