Wayve’s AI self-driving system exists to drive like a human and rival Waymo and Tesla

When I arrived, he was preparing a wonderful lunch of salads, bacon, and huge hunks of good cheese. There are already 385 people to feed in London alone, and nearly 450 employees in total now, including a new US headquarters and a test base that Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: the first public use of Softbank money. This startup may have been under the radar until its headline-grabbing funding round in May, but this startup got its start in 2017, and like most overnight successes, it has been a long time in the making.

This investment was considered a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the world of “self-driving cars.”A trough of disappointment“Very common in technology when hype has to be translated into application. Some of the largest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the hardest problem they had worked on. Very difficult, in some cases: among many others, appleUber and Volkswagen have discontinued autonomous vehicle programs in recent years.

But there is new optimism about autonomy. In addition to Wayve, Alphabet’s deal Waymo It now offers 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and just announced its expansion into Austin and Atlanta starting early next year. Independent trucking service Aurora It will soon make its first driverless rides in Texas. Tesla has finally shown it Electronic taxieven if the half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous passenger transport service Vernwhich uses beautiful, customized two-seater coupes without a steering wheel or pedals, will be launched in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen other cities already signed up.

Wayve may not have anything like Waymo’s scale, budget, or mileage. But she has Alex Kendall, who has the same thing early-Elon A combination of messianic vision, drive, and ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem himself. Wayve takes a completely different, AI-driven approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one that could allow it to scale much faster and spread more widely than its competitors.

“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at the peak of the self-driving car hype cycle,” Kendall told me. “Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, this is a year away, and it’s going to be magical.’ But I saw that the technological approach that most people were taking was not going to give us the future of intelligent machines that we all live in. They thought of autonomous driving as an infrastructure and a robotics problem.” Manually, I think it’s an AI issue.