After Settling With Uber, Waymo Faces Bigger Challenges
“Waymo has the partnerships and technology needed to launch the world’s first self-driving service this year,” a Waymo spokesman said in a statement, pointing to how the company has fully self-driving cars on some public roads, has secured vehicles from Fiat Chrysler
and has partnered with Avis, AutoNation, Lyft and others.
With that brain drain in mind, the Uber lawsuit can also be seen as a fight against a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski,
who also took his services elsewhere — first to Otto, a start-up he created, and then to Uber just six months later.
“We can build on top of that revolution.”
In 2011, Google was among the first companies to build a research lab dedicated to these rapidly evolving techniques,
and a number of researchers from this lab eventually moved on to the Google self-driving car project.
Much of the artificial intelligence technology that has come out of Waymo’s work
and research run by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has made it easier for companies, even start-ups, to compete.
