Paul Lienert, who occasionally comments here, has a piece up on Reuters about an impending IPO for Lyft.
It seems to be in the earliest of stages, and these things move forward and then get pulled back all the time. So who knows if it will happen in the near future or not.
But the column makes the point that a Lyft IPO is a mechanism for the public to invest in self-driving cars.
Of course, public companies like NVIDIA and Tesla and Alphabet (Google/Waymo) have already provided a channel for public investment in autonomous vehicles. But an investment in Lyft at this point is a more direct investment in the future of autonomous vehicles than most other companies.
Disclaimer: Udacity and Lyft just formed a terrific partnership, and I think highly of the company. But I have minimal interaction with them beyond the bounds of the partnership, and I have no idea what plans, if any, they have for an IPO.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to travel to Frankfurt, Germany, to participate in the me Convention. Mercedes hosted the me Convention as a way to incorporate the spirit of South by Southwest into the enormous International Motor Show.
As part of that trip, I participated in Lufthansa’s FlyingLab, whereby I and several other speakers gave presentations onboard an Airbus A380 from San Francisco to Frankfurt.
I spoke on: “How Self-Driving Cars Will Change the World in Ways We Can’t Even Imagine”:
Toyota Research Institute just announced its Platform 2.1 test autonomous vehicle. The first thing that jumps out is that it has two steering wheels.
Somebody told me, “They’re moving in the wrong direction.” It’s easy to tease, but perhaps there are important research goals, particularly human-machine-interaction goals, that will be possible by putting the safety driver in the seat normally reserved (in the US) for a passenger. I assume they thought this through.
Interestingly, Luminar eschewed the normal concern about lidar, which is that they’re too expensive. Instead, it opted to produce a potentially even more expensive lidar that achieves higher performance than competing sensors, including higher resolution and longer range.
Luminar may yet drive down the cost of their individual sensor units as production volumes increase. But, for now, by using Luminar sensors, Toyota seems to be making a bet on performance over price.
The Intel blog post is dated September 18, while the CNBC report on Tesla and AMD is dated September 20, so maybe Intel beat AMD to the punch, and I’m just playing catch up.
The Krzanich post is pretty light on detail. It mainly highlights the massive number of annual automotive fatalities, and asserts that Waymo has been using Intel technology in its self-driving vehicles. No real news here.
But the Tesla-AMD announcement did capture something I neglected to mention in my previous blog post, and which I also think it is safe to assume comes into play in the Waymo-Intel relationship: custom silicon.
Off-the-shelf CPUs and GPUs are general-purpose devices that tend to do a lot of things well. GPUs are primarily built to update graphics on computer monitors, and it’s almost coincidental that this type of parallel computing happens to be really good for machine learning.
But you can imagine that building computer chips specifically for autonomous driving might yield even faster performance. The problem, of course, is how expensive it is to build a chip. The fixed costs are enormous, so they have to be amortized over millions of units of silicon.
FPGAs are a kind of intermediate solution to this problem. Not nearly as expensive to work with as custom silicon, but presumably not as fast, either.
Google (not necessarily Waymo, though) seems to be going a step farther, into full-blown chip design, with its TPUs.
That seems to be what we’re seeing both with Waymo-Intel and with Tesla-AMD, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see NVIDIA and other chipmakers go down that road as well.
To some extent, this is just more daily drama from inside the tiny world of autonomous vehicles in Silicon Valley. It seems like every few days a new partnership forms, or an old partnership frays, or an acquisition is announced.
The Tesla-AMD relationship does have a few interesting aspects, though:
The relationship seems to depend largely on the presence of Jim Keller, an AMD veteran who now heads up Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware Engineering. I had never heard of Keller before, but the man has his own Wikipedia page as a hardware engineer, so I take it he’s a big deal.
AMD had pretty much been out of the self-driving car game until now, at least publicly. This seems to put them right into the thick of it. And unlike Intel or NVIDIA, AMD specializes in both CPU and GPU design, so it has the potential to compete on both ends of the spectrum.
Tesla had a public and messy breakup with Mobileye, which is now owned by Intel. Tesla currently uses the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 in its production vehicles. Now Tesla seems to be trying to singlehandedly turn AMD into an autonomous vehicle chip provider. Should we expect an NVIDIA-Xilinx partnership next?
Also, Keller is a Penn State alumnus, and the Nittany Lions are currently ranked #4 in both the AP and the Coaches’ Polls. Good time to be from State College.
The New York Times recently ran a feature on a new Silicon Valley startup called Aeva, that aims to disrupt the autonomous vehicle sensor market. Two former Apple engineers are working on what sounds like essentially a lidar that measures velocity. Which, to be fair, would be a pretty big breakthrough.
The article was a little amusing in that it quoted Tarin Ziyaee, who is now the CTO of Voyage, the self-driving startup that spun out of Udacity. And, throughout the article, I thought, “Wow, this sounds a lot like Oryx,” a startup I met months ago with at the coffeeshop around the block from my house. Sure enough, at the end of the article:
“Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have built similar hardware, and companies like Velodyne and the start-ups Oryx Vision and Quanergy say they are exploring similar ideas.”
Intro to SDC opens up the world of autonomous vehicles to everybody. This program teaches students the Python, C++, linear algebra, calculus, statistics, and physics that you need to be successful in our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. And once you complete the Intro to Self-Driving Cars Program, you are guaranteed admission to join me in the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program!
Our Flying Car Nanodegree Program takes self-driving cars into the third dimension. This program will launch early next year and will cover how to move vehicles in through the air: drones, quadcopters, and flying cars. I am excited to see where it goes!
The idea is that Facebook’s Oculus headsets could be used everywhere from the factory floor — where they would help autoworkers assemble vehicles more quickly — to in the car, where self-driving technology would free passengers to enjoy in-car virtual reality experiences.
So far it all seems to make sense, but it also seems a little vague. I’ll be excited when we see a specific product or service related to self-driving cars that Facebook wants to launch.
Udacity will be at the International Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt, Germany, this week!
Wednesday
I’ll be flying over on Wednesday as part of Lufthansa’s FlyingLab which is a little bit like South by Southwest in the sky.
Friday
My main event in Frankfurt will be at the me Convention, which is a conference put on by Mercedes-Benz in conjunction with SXSW. On Friday afternoon I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled, “Teaching Machines to Drive Like Humans”, with Sarah Marie Thornton from Stanford, and Danny Shapiro from NVIDIA. Come say hello!
Saturday afternoon we are excited to be holding a career workshop for Udacity students. Students will have the opportunity to take professional headshots, get career coaching from Udacity experts, and hear from me about hiring in the autonomous vehicle industry. This event is full, but drop a note here if this is something you’d be interested in attending for the future.
Saturday evening I’ll be hosting a dinner for Udacity Self-Driving Car students in Frankfurt. This event is full, too, but I am excited to meet everyone and we are working hard to squeeze people in. So if you are an enrolled student and would like to attend, send me an email to david.silver@udacity.com and we’ll find a space.
Sunday
I have to leave Germany on Sunday, sadly 😦
But the reason I’m rushing home is to get to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Udacity has some big announcements coming out next week, so keep your ear to the ground for that!
If you’d like to say hello in Frankfurt, but won’t be able to make any of the events I mentioned here, email me at david.silver@udacity.com. I will have a little bit of down time between events and I’m excited to meet people on my first trip to Germany!
David Silver 