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Alphabet's Waymo Sues Uber For Allegedly Stealing Self-Driving Secrets (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It took Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo seven years to design and build a laser-scanning system to guide its self-driving cars. Uber Technologies Inc. allegedly did it in nine months. Waymo claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that was possible because a former employee stole the designs and technology and started a new company. Waymo accuses several employees of Otto, a self-driving startup Uber acquired in August for $680 million, of lifting technical information from Google's autonomous car project. The "calculated theft" of Alphabet's technology earned Otto's employees more than $500 million, according to the complaint in San Francisco federal court. The claims in Thursday's case include unfair competition, patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation. Waymo was inadvertently copied on an e-mail from one of its vendors, which had an attachment showing an Uber lidar circuit board that had a "striking resemblance" to Waymo's design, according to the complaint. Anthony Levandowski, a former manager at Waymo, in December 2015 downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary and confidential files, including the lidar circuit board designs, according to the complaint. He also allegedly created a domain name for his new company and confided in some of his Waymo colleagues of plans to "replicate" its technology for a competitor. Levandowski left Waymo in January 2016 and went on in May to form Otto LLC, which planned to develop hardware and software for autonomous vehicles.
Uber doing something unethical? This isn't news, it's business as usual.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If these allegations are true, then the fallout from this suit is going to completely undermine Uber's long-term strategy. The direct financial hit may be enough to sink the company outright, but even if it doesn't, they'll be dead in the long term.
If the allegations are not true then it's an almighty blunder by Waymo; it'll hit their credibility really hard, but also their staff morale, because they'll all be wondering if they're going to be next to be falsely accused.
It would seem to me that Waymo know this, so they must believe they have good evidence and a watertight (uber-strong?) case or they wouldn't have gone public with it at all.
Google / Alphabet also has an investment in Uber, which muddies the waters further, and makes it even more certain that they'd only be doing this if they were absolutely convinced of it being true and of it holding up in court.
I'm looking forward to seeing this one play out. Whatever happens, it's going to be messy.
Probably over the next several years actually.
If Uber is forced to either pay Google to use the tech (which I assume is going to be very expensive) or is forced to abandon and restart development from scratch (which may mean having to essentially form a brand new team of employees since current ones may be unable to participate because of their previous association) then Uber's intentions to switch from their current driver-based model to a driverless model may not be possible. If that's so then it makes me wonder if Uber has any chance of succeeding, since it's pretty clear that their human-driven model is shaky at best. They may not be able to sustain it until they have self-driving tech without raising prices, which means at some point they won't be the better choice, from a consumer point of view, than a conventional taxi.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.