Been thinking about hopping to self driving stuff, even though I really enjoy the language side of AI. I'm curious about Cruise in particular, because it both seems ambitious and truly startup-y. Does anybody have information about what it's like over there?
I just had an intro interview the other day. They're GM's self driving division. Seems like a cool place to work if you're interested in self-driving technology
It's run very much like an independent startup that has a tight integration with gm for the hardware side. The nice thing is that we get custom hardware and much better relationships with sensor companies than a startup while taking advantage of gm's economies of scale.
It's about 0.1% GM-yfied when it comes to sw engineering. Gets slightly more entangled for hardware, but can confirm it's very much independent
I saw that cruise just bought the lidar company! That is huge!! It seems to be poised for great success ahead.
What lidar company??? I'm in the middle of interviewing with them. The past few weeks they dropped off the face of the earth and then came back to say that they're working on a huge company milestone. Must be that.
Strobe. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/general-motors-driverless.html
You mean General Motors?
I didn't get the impression is was run that way. Or do you mean, you're playing for the GM team when you play for Cruise?
The latter. I think they still run pretty lean but at some point I would expect that to change. But how does the successful outcome look now that the company has already exited?