IT'S ALIVE!
A team of us from Cruise, Wayve, and Waymo have been heads down training models and building an insane new product at the intersection of AI and computer graphics.
We're still cooking, but DM me if you are a ML researcher or engineer and want to learn more.
AI is changing everything, and it's not just ChatGPT or self-driving cars.
You'd be surprised at just how broadly AI is being applied across tons of industries.
I’ve now invested in 50 AI startups, and here are some recent investments using AI in fascinating applications 👇
Here's
@ylecun
in 1993(!) demoing LeNet-1.
This was the world's first convolutional neural network for handwriting recognition. Today—29 years later—this same approach powers the majority of computer vision.
Such a historical moment, and breakthrough for machine learning.
3 years ago, I started angel investing in machine learning and autonomous robot startups. I'm now 35 startups in, learning a lot, and having a blast.
The future is going to be incredible. Here are just a few of the startups making it happen 👇
We’ve all rightfully been taken by LLMs and how impressive the current state-of-the-art is.
But, don’t sleep on computer vision. The progress is similarly insane.
I find it so fascinating how fine the line is between the world being changed or not.
Were it not for one person at
@OpenAI
waking up super paranoid that they absolutely had to build ChatGPT, it's likely we wouldn't be going through LLM mania today, and that hundreds of
Our self-driving technology hit a big milestone recently.
The speed at which computer vision, robotics, machine learning, sensors, and compute is advancing is mind-blowing.
The result? Ride after ride after ride looking like this one 😍
OK that was nuts.
I was just driven by a fully driverless
@Cruise
car through crazy downtown SF in daytime.
I’ve taken hundreds of rides but my mind is still blown. I can summon this thing 24/7 all across the city now.
I started working on self-driving cars 6 looong years ago.
It's a dream come true to now wake up to videos like this every day.
Today thousands of people have experienced
@Cruise
fully driverless rides. Pumped to make that millions.
Today I got fully vaccinated and became an American citizen.
I moved to the US (from the UK) in 2011 for
@ycombinator
and have felt fortunate to be here ever since. I owe a lot to this country.
This was classic Steve Jobs.
On the back of Michael Dell's infamous “shut Apple down and give the money back to the shareholders” comment, he annihilated Dell laptops with the new iBook.
"It's got some nice fans on the back"
Better products always win over talk.
Super impressed by the latest
@Tesla
FSD. It drives eerily natural, and handled very weird scenarios with no hesitation.
I've ridden for hundreds of hours in driverless cars, and although it's not perfect and I'm a tiny sample, this is exciting!
And no, not an April Fools.
✨ Big news:
@Cruise
is now serving members of the public with fully driverless cars in San Francisco.
Many thought this would take decades, but it's happening! We're now scaling & you can be one of the first to try a safer, smoother ride-hail service.
Read on to learn how 👇
Watch the most advanced robot in the world driving—without hesitation or confusion—through a bunch of anxiety-inducing scenarios.
@Cruise
’s technology is rapidly rocketing beyond human driving capability. So exciting.
🚀 The amazing
@voyage
team (close to 50 now!) has spent two years developing our self-driving technology.
In short: it's super impressive, and we're able to handle the complexity and edge-cases of our first market: retirement communities.
See for yourself.
I recently left
@Cruise
after 2 amazing years.
In that time, we launched & scaled cars with no driver to tens of thousands of happy customers. I'm super proud to have worked at such a special place.
What's next after 7 years in self-driving cars & AI, and what did I learn? 👇
🚘 Buckle in: it’s time to talk about
@Tesla
FSD!
In this thread, I’ll share what I find most impressive and the challenges that remain before the “F” in “FSD” is true.
Let’s go!
Speaking of AI breakthroughs, this is what scaling fully driverless cars—all powered by crazy cool ML—looks like.
We now regularly deploy 100+ fully driverless
@Cruise
cars (no driver, just passengers) concurrently on the streets of San Francisco, scaling faster every day.
🏠 Big news from
@voyage
: Our first self-driving taxi service is live in a truly remarkable community.
4,000 residents can summon a self-driving car and travel door-to-door on 15 miles of chaotic road.
Machines are getting eerily good.
The confident driving shown here by the
@Cruise
AV is, take it from me, remarkable.
The future—enabled by advanced computer vision and machine learning systems—is going to be wild.
@OpenAI
This represents why
@OpenAI
shipped and
@Google
didn't.
How many leaders at
@Google
wake up paranoid enough to put their careers on the line to force something unpopular to launch?
☄️
@ForgeAstro
is building robots to autonomously mine asteroids, returning precious materials to Earth.
Why? One asteroid can contain up to $10,000 quadrillion(!) of rare material.
This is enabled by computer vision, affordable rocket rides, and small sat maturation.
💥 Big news:
@voyage
is being acquired by
@cruise
!
We’ve spent the last 4 years building a self-driving service that restores mobility to those who need it most.
Now at
@cruise
, we will continue to do that, but on an insane, global scale. I’m excited!
Want to know how far along a robotaxi really is?
Challenge it with unprotected turns, and watch as perception, prediction, and planning are insanely stress-tested.
We've now been working on this problem for three and a half years, and the result feels magical.
☀️ Big news from
@voyage
!
We’re now rolling out a self-driving taxi service to over 125,000 amazing residents on 750 (!) miles of Florida road. This is a (private) city like no other.
🎭
@WOMBO
makes creating images with AI easy, fun, and useful.
With 130+ million downloads on iOS and Android and 2 billion images created, they are likely the largest consumer AI startup around.
My 8-year-old uses
@WOMBO
like I did Photoshop way back when. So fun.
Cars are beginning to drive themselves! Slowly but surely, this technology will become ubiquitous.
Curious how it works?
Here’s 30+ minutes of raw footage of
@voyage
’s self-driving A.I. in action. Watch exactly how our A.I. sees the world and makes driving decisions.
Part 1️⃣
🎨 What if video editing was reinvented with AI? Enter
@runwayml
, which enables complex videos to be created with AI in minutes vs. days.
Not only does
@runwayml
speed up creation, they also enable wild ideas that exist only in your mind to come to life.
A group of San Franciscans realized that they can disable Waymo and Cruise robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on the vehicle's hood.
They're now encouraging others to do it: "Hell no, we do not consent to this."
A car that can drive itself. Built by 60 people.
I know the hype in AV has quietened down—perhaps for good reason—but don’t sleep on the autonomy revolution. It’s just beginning!
🤯 A critical moment recently passed by with barely a mention.
Right now –this very moment – there are cars on US roads driving members of the public without a human at the wheel.
This is an insane step forward. Learn more about what happens next.
👉
🎥
@twelve_labs
has developed the world’s best video search, powered by state-of-the-art AI.
Imagine being able to search millions of videos with complex questions, with AI pin-pointing non-obvious but relevant scenes.
Basically, useful video search is finally here.
✌️ Two years ago, we started a self-driving car startup. We were a little insane!
But it's paid off. The
@voyage
team has made ridiculous progress on our path to driverless. I wanted to share that progress and our plans.
2020 is going to be wild.
📰
The
@coinbase
IPO represents why I moved to Silicon Valley 11 years ago.
A handful of people (
@garrytan
,
@rsg
,
@alexisohanian
,
@ycombinator
) placed a bet on a tiny and divisive startup.
Countless other divisive startups will now benefit, and the Silicon Valley magic continues.
A fully driverless
@Cruise
car joins the fun at a roller-party!
I've been in self-driving for 6 years, and this is easily one of the most impressive clips I've ever seen.
Even better, check out how excited the crowd is that a car with no one in it showed up. Such genuine joy ❤️
I think it makes perfect sense for
@Tesla
to prioritize a purpose-built robotaxi over yet another human-driven car.
The opportunity is way bigger, the competition has thinned, it accelerates their humanoid, and they seem to have something special on their hands with FSD v12.
⚡️ Big news in
@voyage
land: we raised a $31m Series B!
What’s next?
🚪 Deliver door-to-door autonomous ride-hail services to communities that need it most
📈 Grow our team of experts
🤫 Expand the G2 fleet & introduce a very special G3 self-driving car
Hearing lots of “you need OpenAI-scale $$$ and resourcing to make a dent in AI” sentiment recently.
This is dangerous. Remember that the original Stable Diffusion was created by just 5 engineers!
Amazing individuals and small teams can and will change everything in AI.
🧠 Introducing
@voyage
Commander, a technology 4 years in the making.
Commander is our self-driving A.I.—powering a door-to-door robotaxi service—and for the first time we are sharing an inside look with lots of detail and videos.
Learn more here! 👉
These magical machines are now moving everyday San Franciscans around their city. No Safety Driver or monitoring required.
It will never cease to amaze me how far machine learning has come to enable this.
Join the party by getting on the
@Cruise
waitlist.
📺 New video! Watch our self-driving system handle lots of complex agent interactions.
The
@voyage
team is making miracles happen. Our tech metrics are growing like crazy MoM thanks to them.
All clips were recorded in the last 10 days and are handled fully autonomously.
🔋 automates the disassembly of EV batteries with AI.
We cannot rely on mining lithium to fuel EV expansion, and human disassembly of EV batteries is dangerous and slow.
The solution: autonomous robots disassembling batteries, powered by machine vision!
🧠 To efficiently scale AI, Geoffrey Hinton believes we need an entirely new computer—likely neuromorphic.
@Rain__AI
is working on precisely that, pioneering a neuromorphic processing unit (NPU) that's 10,000x more efficient, delivering what comes after the GPU & deep learning.
This week,
@Cruise
launched fully driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco.
Yesterday at an event called Under the Hood, we shared just how we did it.
Here are just a few of my favorite details 🧵
👀 Instead of sharing just perfect clips of self-driving cars, how about we also share the imperfect?
I'll start.
Here our car yielded to bicyclists (who are behind a stop-line). We predicted that there was a chance they'd blow through it.
That was a little too conservative.
👁 Computer vision is not without hype, but when you zoom out and view progress in the field for the last year, it's hard not to get ridiculously excited about the problems it's solving.
⛑
@BiofireUSA
protects kids from guns using AI.
@BiofireUSA
is building a handgun that only fires for the authenticated owner, ensuring that kids don’t stumble upon a gun and tragically lose their life.
Imagine incredibly low-latency and accurate FaceID-like auth for guns.
📺 I attended my first
@khoslaventures
summit this year, and the quality of the speakers blew me away. TIL that many talks (from this year and past years) are published online!
These videos are an amazing resource for every founder out there. Here's a few to get you started...
There’s something very special happening at
@Cruise
right now.
Can’t wait to soon share more of what I’ve been able to see internally 🤩
If you’re on the fence about jumping into the AV industry, reply or DM and I’ll try to answer any question (about
@Cruise
or otherwise). AMA!
Self-driving is now scaling.
We said at
@Cruise
we’d launch 2 new markets in 90 days. It happened, with fully driverless now live in Austin and Phoenix, in addition to San Francisco.
It’s taken years and years to get here, but it’s been worth the wait.
I just witnessed the most incredible live and unscripted self-driving trip at
@Cruise
’s All-Hands.
The car autonomously navigated complex construction zones, scooters, jaywalkers, and many double-parked vehicles without skipping a beat.
Blown away would be an understatement.
We're expanding in a big way!
Within 90 days,
@Cruise
is going to be live in both Phoenix and Austin—in addition to San Francisco—with our awesome fully driverless service. I can't wait to serve our new riders.
Going forward, AVs are going to be scaling rapidly 🚀
📸
@opalcamera
has built a beautiful webcam augmented with AI, producing DSLR-like image quality for only $300.
They tightly integrated a 4K mirrorless lens, beamforming mics, and computer vision to deliver the best webcam out there.
⛏️ transforms existing earth-moving machines into fully autonomous machines with AI.
How much more could we build on our planet if we had a low-cost, around-the-clock workforce of robot earth-moving machines? A lot!
🩻 We know AI can dramatically improve detecting health issues in medical imaging, and
@md_ai_
is where that AI is being built.
With
@md_ai_
, you can create or browse the best medical datasets in the world, and then train and deploy state-of-the-art medical ML models.
☁️
@StrongCompute
is speeding up training ML models by 10x-1,000x.
The amount of unproductive time in ML today is staggering, which is why
@StrongCompute
is growing so fast.
One customer: “Strong Compute took our core algorithm training from 30 hours to 5 minutes.”
Fully driverless cars—meaning no human necessary—are now on the streets of San Francisco.
They said it couldn’t be done, or that it might take 10+ years, but
@Cruise
has brought it to life. This is huge.
Enjoy
@kvogt
’s first fully driverless ride!
2019 was a game-changing year for self-driving cars. Many thought we were decades away from fully driverless cars, but they are here, now ✌️
Follow along as I recap just a sample of the amazing work accomplished within the industry in 2019.
It still blows my mind that you can go on a website, pay nothing, and learn how to make a car drive itself.
This new
@udacity
course (featuring
@baidu
) is particularly good for beginners.
🚨 New video! At
@voyage
, we are building driverless cars for those who need it most. Watch this video to see our progress.
Our team has put enormous energy into delivering on that promise with state-of-the-art technology. I get teary eyed watching this one. They are the best.
From founding
@Twitch
, to being acquired by
@GM
for $1B, to raising $10B in outside capital, to solving driverless in San Francisco, to building a custom EV with no steering wheel—this is the epic story of
@Cruise
and
@kvogt
!
Must watch:
👩💻
@argoai
's release of Argoverse is game-changing for self-driving car research.
🗺 290km of mapped roadway
👀 11,319 tracked objects with raw sensor data
🧠 327,790 sequences of interesting scenarios
🔌 A thoughtful API to interact with the data
Let's explore...
🤖 AlphaGo becomes AlphaZero, a generic RL algorithm that has mastered chess (and Go).
"AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and defeated a world-champion program in each case."
The metaverse is cool, but let's also build products that improve the universe, IMO.
Few better ways to do that than making our world safer and greener. The technology to do this is here—check out 105 minutes of a
@Cruise
AV navigating San Francisco entirely by itself.
Watch as we disable our primary perception systems and stress-test
@voyage
Shield, our collision mitigation system.
Shield is a supercharged automatic emergency braking system, powered by super high-res sensors, powerful compute, and SOTA computer vision.
Enjoy 🙏
This latest
@ycombinator
batch is really good.
Hundreds of founders all applying ML in super interesting ways to solve legit problems in any industry you can imagine.
The strongest batch I’ve seen in a long time.
🚧 Big news: We've open-sourced how we safely test our 2-ton
@voyage
autonomous vehicles.
We call it the Open Autonomous Safety (OAS) initiative, and we want to create a standard for the industry. Adopt it at your AV startup!
Startups take a chunk out of you, mentally and physically.
A bit over a year ago, I randomly woke up at 3AM struggling to breathe. I’d never experienced anything like it.
I don’t know about you, but any autonomous driving product that makes moving from A to B more stressful than just driving yourself is not a very good product.
🧠
@Waymo
published a paper on a model called ChauffeurNet, which attempts to drive a car using imitation learning.
ChauffeurNet aspires to more human-like driving, in contrast to traditional robotics approaches which drive like...well...a robot.
The face of someone who just had their mind blown by their first
@Cruise
ride.
10/10, would ride again ✅
Honestly, if you were blindfolded, I don’t think you’d be able to tell if a human or machine was driving. So good.
I’m building something new! ✨
Last year, I founded my next thing with
@jeffrey_hawke
& an incredible team. Progress has been crazy.
Can’t wait to share more. Until then we’re growing our team. If you’re fascinated by the intersection of AI & computer graphics, please DM me!