Not many individuals may inform Tesla CEO Elon Musk “I told you so” fairly like Alex Kendall may. However for the CEO of Wayve, a London-based startup that’s quickly emerged as a key participant in autonomous driving, that barb can wait.
“That’ll be a fun Twitter post one day, but…we’re going to stay humble for now,” Kendall stated Tuesday throughout an onscreen interview on the Fortune Brainstorm AI occasion in London.
When Musk first heard about Wayve’s AI deep-learning method to autonomous driving, he wasn’t bought on it. As a substitute, Tesla opted for a rules-based method through which separate modules are used for notion, planning, and management of a car.
Wayve, in contrast, employs a self-learning AI system whereby uncooked information from a car’s sensors is fed right into a neural community, and from there, deep-learning fashions deal with the car navigation. The system, additionally known as “end-to-end deep learning,” is designed to reply to real-world complexities the way in which human drivers do, fairly than merely comply with guidelines that may not account for these complexities.
Kendall, when taking a journey round London with Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn final yr, defined how the Wayve-empowered car labored.
“None of the way the car’s controlled, in terms of the speed it chooses or the lane it takes, none of this is hand-programmed,” he stated. “It’s not following a map, but it’s making all these decisions based on what it sees.”
In 2023, Tesla introduced a main pivot, saying it could swap to an method just like Wayve’s.
“I remember meeting Elon a couple of years ago, and he didn’t believe end-to-end learning was going to work,” Kendall recalled on the Sifted podcast in October 2023. “And so for him to come out and say: Actually, we’re changing our approach to this. I mean, that’s vindicating for me.”
On the Brainstorm occasion Tuesday, Kendall reiterated that sentiment, saying it was “gratifying” that Tesla made its pivot. However he isn’t one to brag. Autonomous driving, he stated, is “one of the greatest engineering problems there is today,” and he expects “more challenges” on the highway forward. With that in thoughts, “one of the key values we have at our company is humility, and really not assuming we know the solutions.”
Kendall might be forgiven for dropping no less than a little bit humility given the fast ascent of his startup. The New Zealander cofounded Wayve in 2017 following his award-winning PhD analysis at Cambridge College, which confirmed “how end-to-end deep learning could enable safe and real-time scene understanding,” as he writes on his web site.
A yr in the past, Wayve raised greater than $1 billion from SoftBank, Nvidia, and Microsoft, amongst others—simply seven years after its founding.
Wayve hopes many automakers will incorporate its AI expertise. Final month, Nissan turned the primary, saying it is going to combine the startup’s providing into its driver-assist system in 2027.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
