Your Tech Story

self driving cars

Anthony Levandowski

Anthony Levandowski Admits to Having Stolen from Google

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By

Former Google employee and a pioneer of the self-driving car concept, Anthony Levandowski, yesterday pled guilty to stealing trade secrets from Google. He had left the tech giant in 2016, with dreams to start his self-driving truck manufacturing company, which Uber went on to acquire for $680 million. This led to Google’s division for self-driving automobiles, Waymo to sue Uber for using its technology. The lawsuit was finally settled in February, with Uber having to pay Waymo $245 million. Here’s a look at how the saga unfolded and what impact it can have on the industry, and both companies involved.

Indictment and Trial

The prosecutors chose to indict Levandowski last year, in August for 33 counts involving theft, theft of trade secrets and attempted theft from Google. All these allegations are said to have happened when he decided to leave the tech giant way back in 2015. While he had denied these allegations for a long time, Levandowski finally pleaded guilty to the charge that accuses him of trade secret theft. The Federal deal, as per reports, will lead to the other charges against being dropped, thanks to his confession. As per the US District Court of California, this plea carries a sentence that could lead up to 10 years in prison with a fine of $250,000.

Trial till Now

Levandowski said in his plea that he had downloaded the files in question intending to use them personal benefit, knowing fully well that he had no right to do so. However, no date has been set for sentencing him yet. At the beginning of March, the court had ordered him to pay Google $179 million for unlawfully terminating his contract with them. A couple of hours after this sentence was finalized on Wednesday, he filed for bankruptcy protection, under Chapter 11. Once the arbitration panel ruled that he owed Google $179 million, he filed for bankruptcy while in September, a lawyer had said he owned assets worth $72 million.

The case Waymo filed against Uber focused on lidar, which is a laser scanning technology that helps vehicles maintain their autonomy. However, Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing a weekly update regarding the project. This document is said to have contained information regarding quarterly goals, metrics, technical challenges and recommendations on how to overcome challenges. Him pleading guilty has prevented him from now seeking a trial to appeal for conviction. He has also admitted that he downloaded around 14,000 files from the Google server to his laptop.

In 2018, Levandowski had announced that he had founded a new company called Pronto to focus on computer vision rather than lidar. However, when he was indicted on several criminal charges by the prosecutors, he had no choice but to leave this company.

Fall from Grace

Levandowski was once a heavily lauded engineer who had headed Google’s self-driving automobile division, earning it a lot of praise and recognition. Levandowski had been a significant player in the field of AVs since his early 20s, by entering the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge. He then helped Google set up their AV team in 2009, growing within that team and even heading it at one point. However, by 2015, he had been removed from his position of ultimate power, due to power struggles with teammate Chris Urmson, which led to him quitting.

Shortly before leaving the giant, he stole highly confidential documents which contained crucial information regarding the project. Most prosecutors agree that the plea will warrant a sentence which will put him behind bars for around 24 to 30 months. The charges were levelled against him because right after he left Google, he founded his own company Otto which focused on self-driving trucks. It was this company that Uber acquired for $680 million. Waymo sued Uber in 2017, alleging that Uber bought Otto to gain access to their confidential records which Levandowski had stolen. In the 2018 settlement, Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million. However, while handling the case, the judge advised the prosecutors to file a criminal lawsuit against Levandowski for theft, leading to his indictment in August last year. The trial for these was to happen in January 2021, with Levandowski planning to plead innocent. Yesterday evening, he stated that while he was planning of fighting against the case, he decided it wasn’t worth it. He also said that he hopes to put all this behind him and move on.

Elon Musk Plans To Soon Stop Selling Tesla Cars (at Current Prices) to ‘Save Tesla’

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By

Tesla is known for its luxurious electric and self-driving high-end cars. But according to a tweet from the founder of the company itself, the consumers won’t be able to buy these fancy cars. No, it is not like that the company will stop making those cars, but with the integration of a new chip, these cars are going to be quite expensive, and not all the people will be able to buy them.

Tesla
Image Source: theverge.com

The company has taken the initiative in order to recover from the losses it has been suffering, due to the cheaper price of its luxury cars. To prevent and overcome them, the company will be embedding a newly developed chip to its new as well as old cars, including Model S, X and 3S, such that these will become fully-autonomous and will not need the intervention of a human driver.



Musk posted a tweet on his official Twitter account on Sunday that the company will be upgrading its old cars, and will integrate the new chip into them as well as to new cars. So the consumers have a limited time to buy Tesla cars. Upon a tweet asking about when these upgrade will take place, Musk replied, “End of Q4, most likely”.

This means the company has already started working on building those new chips for the cars. According to another tweet from Musk, the owners who have purchased the full self-driving feature, the $6000 software package, will get the upgrade for free.

The company launched this new custom chip in the month of March this year, which already have been integrated to new Model 3, Model X and S vehicles. The upgrade of the older cars is a part of Tesla’s ‘Master Plan, Part Deux’, under which the company intends to make every Tesla car fully-autonomous and bring its dream robo-taxis on the road.

With the integration of the new chip into Tesla cars, the price of these cars may reach up to $40,000, and if remained unsold, these cars can earn even more profits as a robo-taxi.

Apple Acquires Drive.ai, a Dying Startup that Once Valued $200M

News, Tech News / By
Drive.ai van
Image Source: macobserver.com

Reportedly, Apple has just acquired the California based technology company, Drive.ai, for an unknown amount. Noticeably, around a fortnight ago, Drive.ai started planning to cease all its operations, and now, Apple has taken over its regulations, in order to strengthen this four years old self-driving startup, which once even valued a $200 million.

The startup was founded by a group of PhD students in 2015, and since then, it has developed various retrofit kits to transform a simple vehicle into a self-driving car. The kits developed by Drive.ai includes camera-based and LIDAR sensors that help the vehicles drive by themselves. In fact, it is the second AI company that removed the human assistance from its autonomous vehicles. The company had been successfully operating a ride-hailing service in Texas, but due to some failed experiments, it had to shut down.

According to a June 12 filing with California’s Employment Development Department, the company decided to cease its operations and layoff over 90 employees. In fact, the cofounders Sameep Tandon and Tao Wang left the company in June only, and there are a few other key people who have left the company till now.

But with the acquisition, there are chances that the company may be back in the business. According to a report, with the takeover, Apple has also hired a dozen engineers from Drive.ai. All the company’s autonomous and the other assets have also come under Apple’s acquisition. But still Apple would be cutting off 200 of Drive.ai’s employees from Drive.ai’s Titan self-driving car project, and that would be at the beginning of 2020.

The acquisition of a dying autonomous vehicle manufacturing company is only indicating that Apple is still interested in self-driving car software development. This way, it will be a great step for the company in the field of the self-driving car business. The issue here again maybe for Drive.ai, as it has already raised a good amount of money from the biggest of the investors around the world, but it could not survive the pressure. Now we need to see if it can survive with Apple or not.

Renault-Nissan Partners with Waymo to Experiment with Self-driving Cars

News, Tech News / By

The French automobile company, Renault has partnered with Waymo, the automobile subsidiary of tech giant Alphabet Inc., to bring new autonomous cars to France and Japan. The venture also includes Renault’s Japanese partner Nissan, which will be responsible for the launch of those self-driving cars in Japan.

waymo Self-driving cars
Image Source: engadget.com

With this partnership, Renault and Nissan will be researching on how self-driving cars can help in easing-out the transportation of humans as well as goods and develop driverless mobility services for the same. Noticeably, Waymo has already brought such vehicles in Arizona called Waymo One and a limited robo-taxi pilot program in suburban Phoenix last year. Though the launched cars are fully-autonomous, there is always a human monitor sitting on the other front seat of the car for emergencies.

The companies will also work on the commercial, legal and regularity issues, that are related to the development of self-driving cars and making the transportation-as-a-service for both the countries.

According to the reports, the agreement between the companies has been done for a limited but unspecified time. There has been no comment on the same from either of the company. The agreement also has restricted all the three to work with other companies on a similar project.

“This is an ideal opportunity for Waymo to bring our autonomous technology to a global stage, with an innovative partner. With the Alliance’s international reach and scale, our Waymo Driver can deliver transformational mobility solutions to safely serve riders and commercial deliveries in France, Japan, and other countries,” said John Krafcik, CEO Waymo, in a statement.

Though Waymo is quite excited about this merger, the venture will be a 50-50 partnership between Renault and Nissan for both the countries, and there has been no hint on the role of Waymo for the same. The two companies will be setting up a joint committee to work together in France and Japan.

Earlier, the two companies were in talks with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) to bring next-generation technology and work in the field of self-driving cars. But the merger could not take place, and FCA withdrew the agreement.

Tesla’s New Chip will Now Help it Bring Driverless Vehicles on the Roads by 2020

News, Tech News / By

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is a visionary and has been working constantly, towards improving the company’s series of self-driven cars. At the Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California, held on Monday, the company announced a new silicon chip, specifically, built for its self-driving cars, which according to Tesla is “the best chip in the world”.

Tesla in a partnership with Samsung has developed a silicon chip to be installed into the Tesla cars to make them fully self-driven. It is a 260 square millimetre chip having 6 billion transistors, which will be a complete solution for the driver-less cars.

Tesla chip
Image Source: techcrunch.com

While representing the new chip at the event, Musk said, “All cars being produced right now have this computer. All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you have to do is improve the software.”

According to Musk, the chip is being mounted in the Tesla Model S and Model X for over a month now, and for the past ten days the Model 3 cars in manufacturing are also including this very chip in it.

Only a month ago, Musk had mentioned in an interview that Tesla will be bringing the fully-autonomous cars soon, which won’t require a human input to drive. And now, the company has announced this new silicon chip, which, according to the company, is 21 times better than the Nvidia chips that the company has been using in its cars.

The Tesla autonomous cars includes the auto-pilot feature, which still needs the supervision of humans to drive accurately. In the past years, the Tesla cars have seen a few accidents and car crashes, most of which were driving on auto-pilots. So having a new chip that won’t require any of the human inputs is sceptical for many.

This is the first time the company has developed a chip by itself, and Musk too jokingly mentioned the same, saying, “It seems improbable. How could it be that Tesla, who has never designed a chip before, would design the best chip in the world? But that is objectively what has occurred. All Teslas being produced right now have this chip.”

Musk, during the presentation, also said that the company will roll out over a million fully self-driving cars by 2020 with the help of this same new chip.

George Hotz : The First Person to Unlock the iPhone & the Founder of AI Startup comma.ai

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

iPhone indeed is the most loved smartphone and was one of the first keyboard-less mobile phones available in the market. iPhone is not only known for its unique features, but also for the high security it provides to its users. But there was a 17 years old hacker, George Hotz, from New Jersey, who unlocked the newly launched iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers and became the first person to do so. He is not only a famous hacker but has also founded his vehicle automation machine learning company named comma.ai. Also known as Geohotz, even having hacked major security programs, Hotz has always said that he never support hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user information.

Early Life

Hotz was born on 2 October 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, as George Francis Hotz Jr. He completed his high school from Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology. Hotz also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for a brief time.

Being a brilliant student and always ahead in every competition in science and technology in middle and high school, he even won the $15,000 scholarship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007.

Hacking Career

Hotz was always interested in programming and had developed his interest in hacking. In August 2007, only after two months of the launch of the iPhone, Hotz was able to unlock the iPhone. After doing so, he became the first person to unlock an iPhone. Also in 2009, he released a jailbreaking tool for the iPhone 3GS on iPhone OS 3.0. Though in 2010, he discontinued the jailbreaking software.

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

In December 2009, he started working on a new program to breach security on the Sony PlayStation 3. by January 2010, he was able to create a thesis on the hack, but soon in July 2010, he abandoned the idea of entering the security of PS3. But another hacking group fail0verflow also started working on the same, generating the root signing and encryption keys for PS3.

Hotz too published those root signing and encryption keys over his website that led to a serious lawsuit from Sony for both Hotz and fail0verflow. After many court sessions, Sony and Hotz settled the matter outside the court on the condition that Hotz will never try to do any hacking work on Sony products.

Career with Facebook and Google

Hacking had always been his hobby, and his early achievements and knowledge of security algorithms landed Hotz a job with Facebook in 2011 for an unknown role.

Later in July 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with its security auditing team on Project Zero. He stayed in the team for five months and developed an open source program, for dynamically analysing application binaries, named Qira.

In January 2015, he joined Vicarious.com where he worked for 7 months and developed AI algorithms for the company.

Founding Comma.AI

In September 2015, Hotz founded comma.ai, that works on building AI based vehicular automation technology. In 2016, the company built a working self-driving Acura ILX. Later, the company started working on Comma One, a $1,000 software kit that could allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. But after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the further production of the software was cancelled.

During the same time, he was also in talks with Elon Musk to sell his autonomous software for Tesla cars, but the talks never met any conclusion.

On 30 November 2016, the company open sourced its self-driving car software. The open source driving agent from the company runs on some of the car models from companies like Honda, Toyota, and GM, making those models semi-autonomous. Reportedly in 2018, the company served over 4,500 drivers.

Personal Life

Hotz aka Geohotz has been always a keen learner for AI and software development. In 2004 he participated in the ISEF competition in Portland where he demonstrated “The Mapping Robot”. He was among the finalists and got featured on the Today Show and Larry King. He also developed another project named The Googler in 2005 and participated in the ISEF competition with the project, here too, he was one of the finalists.

In 2008, he was among the top 10 Overachievers under 21 listed in the March edition of PC World magazine. In 2014 he won the DEF CON CTF tournament for the second time in a row.

On 14 September 2018, Hotz stepped down from the post of the CEO of the company and became the Head of Research Team.