Computer Vision News - November 2021

3 Summary 5 Raquel Urt sun the technology itself that’s employed in the industry. It’s based on what I call the traditional engineering approach, which is an approach that doesn’t scale nor generalize well across different domains. It’s a technology that requires super expensive, time-consuming, and tedious manual tuning. You can think of the current software stacks as being like super complicated software stacks composed of many very tiny models, where there is a bit of AI in those models, but somehow they need to be combined into this final decision you’re making. If you think about self- driving, it’s a very, very hard task, and the technology doesn’t scale, so there is a need for something else. This is where Waabi comes into play. If you really want to change technology and you know what technology you believe is really going to get us there, the best thing to do is to start a new company. That’s basically why I decided to start Waabi this year. I think you’re hinting at things that you didn’t know when you started at Uber, or that nobody knew at the time. What would you say is the main thing that you have learnt in the past few years? I’ve been working in AI for 20 years and more than 10 in self-driving. At Uber, I learnt a lot about what it means to be a cutting-edge self-driving programme – one of the largest and most impressive out there. I also learnt a lot from Uber Tell us more about Waabi. Give us the elevator pitch! [ laughs ] I think the best way to understand this is there has been meaningful progress in the industry, but this progress has kind of arrived at an impasse due to the type of thing that we employ in the industry. There is a need for a different solution. The key to this different solution is to really unleash the full power of AI. This is what Waabi is providing. It’s a new generation of algorithms, very different than what you see in other companies, that really unleash that power of AI to build technology that “I believe I should utilize my skills to provide positive impact in this world!” CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. All these things became very, very useful when building a new company. I closed one chapter at the beginning of the year, and Waabi is a new chapter in my career. I built up my team over the last couple of years and it was called Waabi because it is very special: we are like a family, which is something that you don’t necessarily see in other companies. We develop a lot of technology, and we learn a lot. It’s not about Uber, it’s not about the industry, this is something else! That’s why I created Waabi in the first place.