It's official: Starsky Robotics has shut down, and founder Stefan Seltz-Axmacher has written a blog post with some tough but important lessons from the experience. Must-read stuff here. medium.com/starsky-roboti…
The biggest lesson? "Supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype... The S-Curve here is why @comma_ai, with 5–15 engineers, sees performance not wholly different than Tesla’s 100+ person autonomy team" 
Another increasingly-familiar lesson: "It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same."
Here's another lesson that everyone in the AV space will be able to relate to. This is why so many VSSAs are brand pamphlets full of stock photos of smiling families. Given that safety is core to AV tech's value proposition, the inability to communicate about it is a huge issue
"From my vantage point, I think the most likely line of human equivalence is L3 which means that no one should be betting a business on safe AI decision makers."
Huge respect to Stefan for turning a tough experience into some important lessons. Please read his whole post.
Huge respect to Stefan for turning a tough experience into some important lessons. Please read his whole post.
