> In early 2011, that plan was to bring 510 Systems into the Googleplex. The startup’s engineers had long complained that they did not have equity in the growing company. When matters came to a head, Levandowski drew up a plan that would reserve the first $20 million of any acquisition for 510’s founders and split the remainder among the staff, according to two former 510 employees. “They said we were going to sell for hundreds of millions,” remembers one engineer. “I was pretty thrilled with the numbers.”
> Indeed, that summer, Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed.
I made a rule for myself that once I find out for sure that a person is an asshole, I will cut all my ties to that person. (Fool me once etc.) Apparently Silicon Valley does not have a similar rule.
"But Larry Page is no longer convinced that Levandowski was key to Chauffeur’s success. In his deposition to the court, Page said, “I believe Anthony’s contributions are quite possibly negative of a high amount.” At Uber, some engineers privately say that Levandowski’s poor management style set back that company’s self-driving effort by a couple of years."
So does this mean Waymo owes Uber damages, or payment for taking the problem off their hands?
I could see Page saying that. Urmson seems to have been the one who took the Waymo technology from "sort of works" to "works reliably". There's a long, slow grind phase of testing, logging, and dealing with more unusual situations before the technology is ready for deployment. Levandowski tends to skip that part, as with the Otto demo. One can see why he got along with Kalanick.
Levandowski comes out of this fine. Google can't sue him. Google has an employee contract which forces employee disputes into arbitration. That arbitration has already happened and can't be reopened. The settlement terms are not public.
The LIDAR design is a side issue. There will be lots of good, low-cost LIDAR units as soon as someone is able to order a few hundred thousand of them. Continental's flash LIDAR will probably be the first successful mass-market flash LIDAR. Quanergy made a lot of noise, but never shipped. Now they seem to be pivoting from automotive to border security. (They want to make Trump's border wall a virtual one.) Tetraview has funding but no products. Velodyne has been making flash LIDAR noises but hasn't demoed yet. Innoviz has demoed an experimental unit and claims to be selling it. Meanwhile, Velodyne is trying to get their rotating devices down to $500 in quantity.
Knowing the Tetravue founders personally and having seen the tech years before any the funding came in I can say that their product is at least as real as their competitors'.
I'm curious what LIDAR solves for border security, that infrared cameras can't already do. I guess they could more easily identify slow moving objects and camoflage?
That's a modulated carrier type system. Those aren't useful in sunlight, because they have to outshine ambient lighting continuously. Pulse-type devices only have to outshine the sun in a narrow frequency band for a nanosecond, which is quite possible.
That's the idea behind the modulation, though. It's relatively easy for the receiver to lock to the modulated AC frequency in the presence of sunlight ("DC" at baseband).
Same concept as TV remotes that frequently use a 36-38 kHz carrier. If they just gated the IR LED on and off at the baseband data rate, interference from room light would be a problem.
Those things are fun. The idea is that you modulate the outgoing beam with a RF carrier, and measure the phase shift of the incoming beam relative to the outgoing beam. Today you can do this directly, because electronics is fast enough to count in the gigahertz range. It used to have to be done by superheterodyning, like a radio receiver. You down-convert both the incoming and outgoing signals using a local oscillator, and get two new signals at a much lower frequency. This transformation has the useful property that the phase difference between the lower-frequency signals is the same as the phase difference at the higher frequency. But at the lower frequency, it's easier to measure the phase difference. Also, you get the selectivity of a superheterodyne receiver.
That's fine for a scanner, where you only need one copy of the electronics, but doing it for every pixel means something like a radio receiver behind each pixel. Still, you could probably do that now.
The SwissRanger [1], a short-range time of flight imaging camera, worked like that. It's been discontinued.
(I fooled around with this in the early 1990s, trying to build a laser scanner. Too many noise problems.)
Yeah, that's an intriguing piece of hardware. A camera that outputs a Z buffer at conventional digital-photo resolutions and data rates would have lots of uses, but it sounds like it fell short of that goal.
The stuff he stole wasn't necessarily his own work. Page is saying that not only Levandowski didn't help, he also stole the hard work of the other engineers.
I understand, but still find it humorous that Google & Uber now say Levandowski didn't make positive contributions. It's like saying my ex-girlfriend that I lived with for 4 years and moved across the country for, was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens.
Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.
It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.
I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.
Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.
> was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens
Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.
Wow. Thanks for sharing this. I think this is overlooked by society today. People have no idea what it takes to truly make software. I would argue most of the people on the software side in tech have non human like abilities which enable such great technology stacks to be developed. It's such a shame that we are so quick to judge, especially when the people have no idea what went into devolpment of a technology. We Champion the outcome but not the process. I think until there is a shift in thinking and celebrating the process and the product you will constantly see nonsense comments, like Page stated, appear in a vicious loop. It would be great to see them release the emails of praise. It just sucks that negative information travels or carries more weight than positive information.
Ha, ha, yes; I originally thought it was similar to a bitter ex-boyfriend thing, especially since Levandowski and Thrun basically invented the Google self-driving car program.
I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.
The man was giving a deposition to enemy lawyers in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. I wouldn't try to derive his raw, uncensored opinion of the man from that data point alone.
No, what Page is saying, which is corroborated by this article, that after Sebastian Thrun's departure, Levandowski actively inhibited the project. Because he didn't get along with Thrun's replacement, Anthony's squabbling caused project delays to the point where Page had to personally mediate between the two. Later, Levandowski solicited Chauffer employees to quit Google to join his startup.
When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.
The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.
>> When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.
I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?
They may have reported directly to Page. Not unusual for a high profile projects with founder attention until they get bored and move on to something else.
this kind of thing happens over and over in SV. the east coast equivalent is hedge fund managers who continue to blow up or just not produce, yet, always manage to raise new funds.
Is it though? Name some funds that have blown up and have continued to raise Capital again? I think you're confusing the two because I think they are drastically different, but that is just my opinion. As the saying goes,there's a sucker born every minute.=) Or as a troll would say, don't hate the player hate the game.
on the one hand, it's hard to read too much into this statement: what else is Larry going to say?
but if you assume it's accurate, you've really got to wonder who's driving the bus. A few months ago it's "let's make this guy rich if this succeeds" and letting him start businesses on the side, and then all of a sudden it's the opposite. It would almost make one think that, maybe, everyone isn't so great at assessing impact and contribution of an individual. And if that's the case, maybe everyone should slow the roll on the whole fetishization of engineers/visionaries that's such a favorite pastime in the valley?
So they discover that he was routing contracts to his own companies, for any other employee this would be unethical behavior and out of the door, but no, this is just fine in this instance. And then, many years later they get surprised...
> In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”
I'm sure this is strictly on the up-and-up, but in the 70's this was a classic tax dodge that many folks tried. The problem was if you got caught in any inconsistencies where, for some purposes, you seemed to be acting as a regular business while representing yourself as a church to the govt.
> Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation.
Is this true? All churches must make their IRS returns available?
> I'm sure this is strictly on the up-and-up, but in the 70's this was a classic tax dodge that many folks tried.
And for this reason it's incredibly difficult to get tax-free status after the whole "new religion" movement in the 1970s. The bar the IRS sets is far higher now. Which is why this is very likely not the motivation here... any lawyer would tell you this and I'm sure this guy has plenty of lawyers.
> And for this reason it's incredibly difficult to get tax-free status
Churches still have it pretty easy, they are excepted from having to file for tax exempt status, don't have to file an annual information return. They are not required to obtain 501(c)(3) status.
Legitimate churches, that is. The IRS is free to question your status as a church but is unlikely to if, for instance, you are part of a recognized national church organization, or otherwise function as a regular church.
There pretty much is no such thing as an illegitimate church in the USA. The IRS is too scared to touch that anymore.
John Oliver famously made fun of this on a segment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg
Makes me think of Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land". Although arguably, they really had something going for them.
Anyway, always interesting to hold Heinlein's writing up to contemporary society. Or rather, to have comparisons spontaneously appear in one's thinking as one surveys circumstances.
There's some claims that Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard had discussions about religion prior to the writing of Stranger in a Strange Land and founding of Scientology.
There are 501(c)(3) "non-profit religious corporations" and 508(c)(1)(a) "non-profit religious churches". Only 501(c)(3) must submit documents to the IRS because they are a "corporation".
As a side note, 508(c)(1)(a) can also speak about politics while 501(c)(3) are forbidden from doing so.
> As a side note, 508(c)(1)(a) can also speak about politics while 501(c)(3) are forbidden from doing so.
Er, that's not exactly true. 501(c)(3) aren't forbidden from speaking about politics. There are restrictions on the ways in which they can (e.g. no overt party affiliation) and the degree to which they can do so. For example, they can spend time lobbying, but only 10% of their time and only 10% of their budget (I don't remember if it's still 10%, but that used to be the number). Oftentimes, 501(c)(3)s will have a separate, associated entity that they use for their political lobbying, to avoid having to keep track of their resources when mixed and prove that it's under this threshold.
508 doesn't provide an alternative kind of tax exempt organization, it identifies rules governing 501(c)(3), and 508(c) identifies exceptions to the rules governing which 501(c)(3) orgs are presumed to be “private foundations” unless they notify the Treasury otherwise. All organizations described by the exception in 508(c)(1)(a) are, by definition, organizations also described in 501(c)(3), and so governed by the rules applicable to such organizations.
I had not previously known before this article: Levandowski was one of the first employees of Velodyne and did much of the engineering regarding the inter-device networking.
Is there any company in the self-driving realm that he isn't deeply connected to?
The most interesting thing in this article to me is the realization that the Velodyne that makes lidar is the same Velodyne that made subwoofers. I always thought they just shared a name.
"Part of the team’s secret sauce was a device that would turn a raw camera feed into a stream of data, together with location coordinates from GPS and other sensors. Google engineers called it the Topcon box, named after the Japanese optical firm that sold it. But the box was actually designed by a local startup called 510 Systems. “We had one customer, Topcon, and we licensed our technology to them,” one of the 510 Systems owners told me.
"That owner was…Anthony Levandowski, who had cofounded 510 Systems with two fellow Berkeley researchers, Pierre-Yves Droz and Andrew Schultz, just weeks after starting work at Google....
"Google’s engineering team was initially unaware that 510 Systems was Levandowski’s company, several engineers told me. That changed once Levandowski proposed that Google also use the Topcon box for its small fleet of aerial mapping planes. “When we found out, it raised a bunch of eyebrows,” remembers an engineer. Regardless, Google kept buying 510’s boxes."
Raising eyebrows? Starting a company to design products to sell to your employer through a third party would raise more than eyebrows for most of the people who tried it.
[Edit]
"In early 2011, that plan was to bring 510 Systems into the Googleplex. The startup’s engineers had long complained that they did not have equity in the growing company. When matters came to a head, Levandowski drew up a plan that would reserve the first $20 million of any acquisition for 510’s founders and split the remainder among the staff, according to two former 510 employees. “They said we were going to sell for hundreds of millions,” remembers one engineer. “I was pretty thrilled with the numbers.”
"Indeed, that summer, Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed. “I regret how it was handled…Some people did get the short end of the stick,” admitted Levandowski in 2016. The buyout also caused resentment among engineers at Google, who wondered how Levandowski could have made such a profit from his employer."
Yep. I guess this is another Silicon Valley success story.
> Starting a company to design products to sell to your employer through a third party would raise more than eyebrows for most of the people who tried it.
My employer fired someone for that just last month.
I hate those extremely passive non-apologies that are attempts to squirm out of admitting you did wrong. There are far worse things that happen in the world, but I certainly hope this comes back to bite him in the ass
I'm somewhat curious about that. I suspect the Otto buyout was tied to conditions he breached, so maybe zero there.
It's unclear how much of the after tax $100m of the Google payout he spent building up Otto. They did have 90 or so employees, and probably other fairly big spending, though not for that long.
Perhaps rich, but I suspect much less so than he would have been had he stayed put.
He just seems like a spoiled brat who always got to play with all the toys he wanted and everything just happened to line up for him... Until recently. It's good to see that these people get a dose of reality sometimes.
The $600M was likely funny money, i.e. stock with vesting conditions. It's unlikely he has much of that. His Google pay was supposedly $120M, so after tax he should still have at least $60M left.
ah in which case... he likely did put in personal capital until the uber deal went through (it closed very quickly after the company's founding, like 12~16 months iirc?)
Many believe there won't be much of a financial impact due to forced arbitration which may still be in process, but I believe any progress or result is still confidential at this time. Criminal prosecution may happen separately?
Did Wired change its title? I can't figure out any other reason that the HN title would be so different (and value-laden). Maybe the OP or mods can fix this?
It's the HTML doc title (often a source of slightly reduced baitiness). I prepended his name to reduce the swelling a bit further.
It's still not a great title in the misleading+bait department (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but we prefer to use language from the article itself wherever possible. If you or anyone can suggest a better—more accurate and neutral—title, we can change it again.
We have to reserve judgment before he has his day in court, but there are a LOT of alleged irregularities. For starters: having management and decision authority at company A & acquiring technology from Company B, that you own.
And, when the stakes are high, there’s no room to play loose and fast with IP.
> Can we ever trust self-driving cars if it turns out we can’t trust the people who are making them?
This is a ridiculous question. Any organization may include untrustworthy people (cf. Volkswagen emissions scandal) but that does not make their products unsafe, necessarily.
I'm not sure that was the best example for your point, the few untrustworthy people in Volkswagen did cause cars to not work as advertised. That's an example for not trusting any of their products anymore.
Look, it wasn't everyone in the company. Just the CEO, a team of product designers, some developers, the entire management chain between the coder and the CEO, and maybe some people in Q&A.
That's no reason to paint the entire company with a broad brush.
Sure, I brought that up for a reason. Despite some underhanded maneuvering and cheating, the emissions-compromised cars still passed independent safety tests and I haven't heard of anyone being killed by them.
They won't be killed by the cars physically running them over or otherwise going out of control, true, but that's because the untrustworthy people chose to be untrustworthy in emissions standards and not in handling or self-driving algorithms or anything. You can't rely on them always making that choice, because they're untrustworthy.
> The researchers [examining the health impact from the 2.6 million affected cars sold in Germany] estimate that 1,200 people in Europe will die early, each losing as much as a decade of their life [edited for brevity]
I have no doubt that the extra pollution is doing health damage. I strongly want more air pollution regulation. I don't trust Volkswagen, and I had one of the super-polluter TDIs, and sold it back to VW.
But this claim of 1,200 premature deaths by up to a decade seems goofy. If VW's 2.6M cars in Germany alone were taking a decade off anyone's life, it seems like we'd all be dead already. The world has over a billion polluting motor vehicles, and we're not even talking about airplanes, fires, factories, natural sources of NOx, or energy production. Car emissions are a minority of the total.
For sure, lots of people are getting sick from pollution in Europe and globally, but I wish the authors had stuck with person-years of life rather than try to state it as a specific number of people affected. Whatever actually happens, assuming it was even possible to pinpoint VW, which it's not, the probability that number of people affected in Europe is near 1,200 is almost zero. So, I guess at least consider calling it what it is: someone's estimate.
Sure, they passed a safety test and didn't run anybody over because the emissions monitoring system doesn't affect the handling of the car
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that the same kind of wilful dishonesty around monitoring cars' ability to choose the appropriate speed, direction or reaction in certain road situations wouldn't result in fatal accidents?
...and every Jihadi is our government's wet dream to use as propaganda for endless war... that generates Jihadis. Think about the big picture next time.
Unless they are tightly locked down by the manufacturers. Perhaps jihadis will not be able to hack them in such a way as to take remote control, and perhaps the manufacturers will eventually make the automatic not-plowing-into-pedestrian system override driver controls.
Yes, no system is perfectly unhackable, but since terrorist cells tend to be small and relatively isolated I could see it being the case that the people who want to use cars as remote weapons would not be people who have the time and talent to make that happen.
State-sponsored groups may be a different story of course.
> Perhaps jihadis will not be able to hack them in such a way as to take remote control.
That is wishful thinking. Islamic State has been very successful in recruiting and radicalizing young english speaking hackers in Europe -- mostly in Britain (children of Pakistani immigrants), Belgium (2nd generation Moroccans) and France (descendants of french-algerian immigrants).
> Hussain, a high profile recruiter for ISIS who hacked CENTCOM’s Twitter and YouTube accounts, was considered the second ranked British jihadi behind Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John). Hussain was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Syria in August 2015.
I don't understand it but a large percentage of fundamentalist terrorists were engineering/science majors in college, so I wouldn't count on them not having expertise.
Also batting for non Islamic homegrown terrorism, Timothy McVeigh was a programmer in his teens, and the Unabomber was a child prodigy, starting college two years early.
Anyone care to explain the down votes? The threat of Jihadis using self-driving cars is a very real one.
Recently a plot was unearthed , and thwarted, in London. A state sponsored actor with ties to ISIS branch in Libya was trying to start a self-driving car rental agency.
Couldn't agree more. The only thing I know about the situation is what I've read, but many in this thread says "clearly he's a brilliant engineer" and yet, after reading the article, it's less clear to me that he's personally done as much amazing engineering as everyone is saying.
I read the parent comment as don't, on average, make money for their employers. Which I assume is the way that Taleb points out, which is make a little most of the time and occasionally lose a lot.
To me, it appears as if the sole purpose of the article is to redeem Levandowski and not to report in a balanced manner in what he had been accused of doing.
The article tells a story of a very clever person repeatedly disregarding other drivers' safety and legal obligations who apparently ripped off his employees and his main employer with side projects long before the Uber case, and whose "religion" sounds like either further evidence of apparent self-important fanatical weirdness or (as other users have pointed out) a tax dodge.
Either you've skimmed it, or you have a very unusual concept of what "redeems" someone...
Perhaps I missed something but I didn't see the redemption in it. It seemed like two different articles patched together, one about the religion, the other about the lawsuit, trying desperately to make a compelling article. It just feels lacking in totality..
The original headline is: "God is a Bot and Anthony Levandowski is His Messenger". IT ends with an anonymous former colleague saying, "If he could just play it straight, he could be the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. But he just doesn’t know when to stop cutting corners."
That's not a description that will be particularly redeeming to a general audience, especially for readers who are cynical of tech's reach, and things like Zuckerberg becoming more political.
>Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed.
> Indeed, that summer, Levandowski sold 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots to Google – for $20 million, the exact cutoff before the wealth would be shared. Rank and file engineers did not see a penny, and some were even let go before the acquisition was completed.
I made a rule for myself that once I find out for sure that a person is an asshole, I will cut all my ties to that person. (Fool me once etc.) Apparently Silicon Valley does not have a similar rule.