Show Notes
Cruise is a self-driving car startup founded in 2013 — at a time when most people thought of self-driving cars as the stuff of science fiction. And yet, just three years later, the company was acquired by GM for over a billion dollars, having shown itself to be a genuine player in the race to make autonomous driving a reality. Along the way, the company has had to navigate and adapt to a rapidly changing technological landscape, mixing and matching old ideas from robotics and software engineering with cutting edge techniques like deep learning.
My guest for this episode of the podcast was one of Cruise’s earliest employees. Peter Gao is a machine learning specialist with deep experience in the self-driving car industry, and is also the co-founder of Aquarium Learning, a Y Combinator-backed startup that specializes in improving the performance of machine learning models by fixing problems with the data they’re trained on. We discussed Peter’s experiences in the self-driving car industry, including the innovations that have spun out of self-driving car tech, as well as some of the technical and ethical challenges that need to be overcome to make self-driving cars hit mainstream use around the world.
More from Towards Data Science
Progress in AI has been accelerating dramatically in recent years, and even months. It seems like every other day, there’s a new, previously-believed-to-be-impossible feat of AI that’s achieved by a world-leading lab. And increasingly, these breakthroughs have been driven by the same, simple idea: AI scaling.
It’s no secret that a new generation of powerful and highly scaled language models is taking the world by storm. Companies like OpenAI, AI21Labs, and Cohere have built models so versatile that they’re powering hundreds of new applications, and unlocking entire new markets for AI-generated text.
Imagine you’re a big hedge fund, and you want to go out and buy yourself some data. Data is really valuable for you — it’s literally going to shape your investment decisions and determine your outcomes.
Today, we live in the era of AI scaling. It seems like everywhere you look people are pushing to make large language models larger, or more multi-modal and leveraging ungodly amounts of processing power to do it.
Deep learning models — transformers in particular — are defining the cutting edge of AI today. They’re based on an architecture called an artificial neural network, as you probably already know if you’re a regular Towards Data Science reader. And if you are, then you might also already know that as their name suggests, artificial neural networks were inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks, like those that handle information processing in our brains.