81–90 of 399 posts
Isn't it or something has changed lately?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.
Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…
Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
After Uber hired and stole technology from Waymo, which they got caught and the engineer prison time I believe (?), looks like now they are going to go the route they should have always gone since they didn't have the technical capability to pull it off.. partnership.
Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :) >In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. >He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…
give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
Google owns a bit over 5% of Uber at 70B and a very high percentage of waymo at 30B evaluation. (last measured) so incentive is for Waymo to succeed / grow. It seems counter intuitive to me that they do a strategic partnership with Uber given low switching cost of using another app if it had meaningful cost benefits to the consumer. Additional Google owns the Android platform so could leverage that to it's advantages…
Yeah, Google could build a Taxicab button into Google Maps and completely destroy Uber. But I guess they don't want to wake up the regulatory watchdogs.
This doesn't really make sense to me. What does Waymo get out of this? It seems to me like if the value proposition in self driving is there (privacy, consistency, etc), people would be willing to download another app? Especially once word of mouth goes through. Plus currently the Waymo app has neat features (when the car is on its way to you, it shows you stuff like when it's stopped at a red light or whatever) that…
What people don't realize is that full autonomous does not work 100%. There are always people watching and taking over if something goes a foul. I can see Uber drivers sitting in front of computers taking over from the autonomous system to provide a pseudo autonomous experience.
Waymo sends physical human drivers to a car if the Waymo driver (software) is stuck. Remote humans can reach into the model to fix e.g. label problems (e.g the driver thinks this is a pedestrian but it's actually a life size cardboard Captain Picard, thus it's not a problem to drive very close to it) but they cannot drive the car.
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Alphabet has a large stake in Uber. They don’t need to own it outright to realize huge returns.
How much of Uber does Alphabet own? They do not show up in the top 10 list here, so presumably 1% at most? https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=UBER https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/uber/holders/ Seems like pocket change compared to Alphabet’s other investments.
I think they sold it in 2019 when their lockup expired, but I can only find "they're thinking of doing it" news (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/ceo-david-krane-suggests-g...) and not an announcement.
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Haha, that wasnt some random ass engineer :) >In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. >He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.
I forgot he got pardoned. Trump presidency: if you have money you could use that money to literally buy a get out of jail card.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers... especially Marc Rich