Summary of Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation | Lex Fridman Podcast #14

00:00:00 - 00:55:00

Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise Automation, discusses his company's work on autonomous vehicles and the challenges of the technology. He describes how he got interested in robotics and the importance of having a team that is passionate about the work.

• 00:00:00 Kyle Vogt, the President and CTO of Cruz Automation, discusses his company's work to solve one of the biggest robotics challenges of our time - vehicle automation. He talks about how he got interested in robotics and the challenges he faced when trying to build a fighting robot. He recalls his experience competing in BattleBots and how it helped him develop his engineering skills. He shares his opinion that autonomous robots are more appealing than robots that are mechanically controlled, and he talks about the challenge of designing a system that can handle intense power outputs and survive in a competition.
• 00:05:00 Kyle Vogt discusses his early experiences with programming and how it led him to pursue a career in self-driving cars. He recalls the first time he wrote a computer program and the excitement it generated. He discusses how advances in artificial intelligence have allowed for more complex programs, such as deep learning, that can solve more difficult tasks.
• 00:10:00 Kyle Vogt, a software engineer and former DARPA Grand Challenge contestant, discusses the history and development of autonomous vehicle technology. He notes that the concept of autonomous vehicles captivated people in the 1980s, and that the original DARPA Grand Challenge was an attempt to push the boundaries of the technology. He attributes the success of the challenge to its ability to get a large number of talented engineers exploring the space.
• 00:15:00 Kyle Vogt, a software engineer at Cruise Automation, discusses how DARPA's Urban Challenge and Robotics Challenge led to the development of the technology that Cruise Automation uses today.
• 00:20:00 Kyle Vogt founded Cruise Automation in 2013 with the goal of developing self-driving cars. The company was acquired by General Motors in 2016 for 1 billion dollars. In October of that year, Vogt realized that Twitch was not a successful company and decided to focus on self-driving cars instead. He found that the technology had to be hard, juicy, and have a positive impact on society for him to be motivated to work on it. In 2017, Cruise Automation announced that it had developed a self-driving car that could drive itself in the rain.
• 00:25:00 Kyle Vogt explains his idea for a company that would retrofit vehicles with autonomous driving capability, and how the business model would have to be different from those of traditional carmakers.
• 00:30:00 Kyle Vogt discusses the challenges of taking a company like GM into the future of autonomous cars. Vogt credits the company's leadership for embracing change and helping to build a culture of continuous improvement.
• 00:35:00 Kyle Vogt discusses the opportunities and challenges for autonomous driving, focusing on the benefits for ride-sharing and delivery. He believes that the technology has reached a baseline, but that reliability, consistency, and safety needs to be improved before monetization can happen.
• 00:40:00 Kyle Vogt discusses the challenges of autonomous driving, specifically how humans are better at handling edge cases than computers. He describes the continuous improvement process that Google has been using to improve its autonomous driving technology.
• 00:45:00 Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise Automation, discusses his experience founding two successful startups, the importance of passionate co-founders, and the importance of perseverance.
• 00:50:00 Kyle Vogt discusses his experience at Y Combinator and how it helped him grow his business. He also talks about the importance of having a team that is passionate about what they are working on and how to find that team.
• 00:55:00 Kyle Vogt discusses cruise automation with Lex Fridman, discussing the technology and how it is being used currently.