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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"Khosrowshahi said the company is winding down its product incubator and artificial-intelligence lab"

Does that mean they are officially out of the self-driving car business? Wouldn't you need your AI lab if you were still pursuing that?

Also, if you're hitting the paywall: https://outline.com/VL6xaR

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"AI Labs" tend to publish papers more than they actually work on real projects, so I wouldn't assume shutting down an AI lab implies suspending the self-driving car project.

I dont know if the whole team was laid off, but I can confirm that a lot of (most?) people working on self-driving were laid off today.

(My source is a friend working on self-driving who was laid off today)

My stomach dropped when I saw the thread and checked in with my pal at ATG. She's safe but half of her department (mapping) is gone.

AI engineers cost an absurd amount of money for dubious ROI in the self-driving car space.

Isn't just a classic risk-vs-reward bet for a company like Uber?

That's true in more than just in the self-driving car space. Even at companies like AAPL and AMZN where ML focused researchers/engineers work on production related tasks, I've seen their value production is dubious at best.

[Disclaimer: AAPL engineer, technically classified as ML]

I would argue that ML researchers/engineers have a clear impact on AAPL products in several areas:

* FaceID

* Steadily improving speech recognition accuracy in Siri

* Considerable improvement in speech synthesis quality

* Increasing sophistication in camera image processing

In my experience working on these product teams, most of the real gains are just from solid engineering combined with public advances in ML. The teams filled with ML specific folk aren't able to accomplish much.

These are different efforts from ATG, the self-driving car division.

I thought the self-driving unit had been spun off. This article [1] (from April 2019) said:

"Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works on self-driving vehicles, has netted an investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund ($333 million), Denso and Toyota ($667 million combined) … The investment values the division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), at $7.25 billion and creates a newly formed corporate entity with its own board."

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/uber-nabs-1-billion-self-dri...

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