AVS

Meet 2020’s Valedictorian

It’s no secret that this year hit the autonomous driving industry hard: layoffs, problems collecting data, timeline setbacks, hardware shipping issues, you name it. 

But Waymo still landed an additional $3 billion in external financing—and it launched both Waymo One, its fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and Waymo Via, its self-driving truck and freight venture. 

And Waymo has New Year's resolutions for both. We spoke with Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo's senior director of product management, to find out what they are. Read on for a peek, and click here for the full interview.

Waymo’s 2021 roadmap

For ride-hailing: Expand services, continue testing in multiple locations, and—as the fifth generation of the Waymo Driver, its autonomous driving software, rolls out—add more all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs into its full-service fleet in Phoenix and testing fleet in San Francisco. 

For trucking and freight: Continue delivery partnerships with UPS and AutoNation in Phoenix, expand autonomous truck testing across the Southwest, continue delivering freight for fleet customers, and—with Daimler—work toward building a truck with systems that safely allow for no human backup driver. 

On the ride-hailing trucking overlap

Panigrahi: There is tremendous overlap between vehicle platforms on ride-hailing and trucking. Because we’re developing one core autonomous driving system, we’re able to use the same set of sensors and core software algorithms across both cars and trucks. Our simulation infrastructure is also applicable across both platforms. 

And, by pursuing both Waymo One and Waymo Via in parallel, what we learn with one area directly helps improve the other. We aren’t just taking what we’ve learned from cars and applying it to trucks; we’re taking what we learn from our trucks and business use cases and applying that back to ride-hailing. 

• For example, all of our surface street experience on the car side will help us unlock full hub-to-hub delivery for our fleet customers on the truck side, while all of our freeway driving experience on the truck side will advance those driving capabilities on the car platform. 

On the pain points of deploying a robotaxi fleet

Panigrahi: On the technical side, you’re looking at ensuring your stack can handle the everyday nuances of driving on city streets safely and reliably, over and over again. That means not only assessing how your technology performs in theory, but also how it handles the messy reality of real-world driving. 

• Operating that technology as a full robotaxi fleet then requires additional systems you have to consider: rider support, making software updates over time, protocols for how to handle emergency situations. 

Then, you need to take this tech and build it into a product that will be both convenient and comfortable for riders. The first ride or two without a human driver may be novel and exciting, but at the end of the day, we’re developing a service that riders will be able to use in their everyday lives. That’s where a lot of our current work is focused: improving pickups and drop-offs, fine-tuning routing, and making maneuvers smoother. 

Click here for the rest of the interview.

SPONSORED BY GATSBY

Stocks? Snore.

Stocks are fine, but what really gets us jazzed is a company like Gatsby, who is making the options market accessible to more investors. 

Gatsby is the options trading platform for a new generation of investors. With the options market growing, investors are using Gatsby to leverage the powerful investment vehicle in a digestible, responsible way. The market had over $14 trillion (with a T!) of options contracts traded in 2019—and things don’t seem to be slowing down.

And now you can invest in this fintech revolution by investing in Gatsby directly. Since launching a year ago, more than 200k contracts have been traded on their platform—that’s more than $50mm of transactions. 

The campaign closes Friday, February 12th (or when they’ve raised $5 million) and has already reached $2.7m, so the time to invest in Gatsby’s options revolution is literally right now.

FROM THE CREW

From Social to Decentralized Networks

Gemini is a US cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who, thanks to The Social Network, need no introduction. Last week, the startup announced it’s launching a credit card with crypto rewards. The Winklevii also hinted that they are considering a public offering for their exchange. 

If you want to dive deeper into Gemini, you’re in luck. Business Casual dropped an episode today with Cameron and Tyler as the guests. Listen here. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Google researchers have trained a large language model on 1.6 trillion parameters. GPT-3—one of the largest and most sophisticated language models ever—was trained on 175 billion. 

Quote: “It’s a new model for society we’ll be testing.”—Marc Lore, founder of Jet.com and Walmart e-commerce chief. He’s leaving to focus on building “a city of the future.” 

ICYMI: Check out our coverage of the first-ever virtual CES, which ended Thursday.  

SPONSORED BY CISCO

Cyber resilience equals business brilliance. That’s a pretty sweet rhyme AND some wise words to live by when managing a modern workforce—at least according to Cisco, the folks who’ve been operating on the cutting edge of business for years. Today, Cisco wants to help you reimagine your business resiliency, resulting in a more connected, efficient, and secure workforce. Soak up the Cisco knowledge here.

THREE THINGS WE'RE WATCHING

Tomorrow: Netflix reports earnings. With more competition in the streaming wars, how does Netflix plan to stay on top? How much is it investing in original content? What does Netflix expect its churn rate to look like in a vaccinated world—and without The Office and Gossip Girl in its catalog? 

Wednesday: US presidential inauguration. Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has urged Americans to stay away from the nation’s capital for the event, due to the possibility of violence. While the inauguration will be a virtual event for the vast majority of the country, content platforms are also taking action to prevent online-to-offline activity in DC. 

Thursday: IBM reports earnings. Analysts expect a sizable annual drop in Big Blue’s quarterly revenue. 

HOLIDAY WEEKEND READS

• A genealogy of the ImageNet dataset, “the single most important benchmark in the field of computer vision, and perhaps AI as a whole.” (Logic)
• VCs love to innovate, but are they prioritizing the right innovations? (MIT Technology Review)
• An attempt to settle a 25-year-old bet about whether or not tech will destroy society. (Wired)
• The AI Incident Database is a “repository of documented failures of AI systems in the real world,” which aims to help the industry avoid repeating past mistakes. (VentureBeat) 
• A look at how embryo selection algorithms could boost the success of IVF. (Future Human)
• A robot could be the newest member of your surgical team: They’re now helping to replace knees, hips, and other joints. (NYT) 

TECH THROWBACK

On this day in 1995, Yahoo! registered its domain name. The site has faded from glory since then, but once upon a time it was valued at $125 billion—aka more than Snap’s and Twitter’s current valuations combined. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Intel’s roadmap to reinvention 
• GM’s president on its new B2B bet for electric vehicles
• Apple, Google, and AWS pull support for Parler