Uber vs Waymo

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Google startup company Weymo and car service company Uber are
gearing up for a massive court battle, and it all
has to do with self driving cars. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and this is tech stuff. Daily lawsuits focusing on intellectual
property are fairly common in the text sphere. For example,

(00:24):
Apple and Samsung have waged global war against one another
in various courtrooms with claims and counterclaims of IP theft.
But there's a face off that has been garnering more
attention in the technosphere over the course of it pits
Weymo against Uber. Weymo is a spinoff company from Google.
It got its start as Google's self driving research and

(00:46):
development team. Today it's one of several companies under the
umbrella of Google's parent company, Alphabet. Uber is the car
service company that has been fighting pr battles on multiple
fronts over the last couple of years. Company executives have
faced tough questions about sexual harassment, background checks on Uber drivers,
the number of hours drivers work during a week, and more.

(01:06):
But this particular battle focuses on valuable information and technology
for self driving cars. Much of the case depends upon
the actions of Anthony Lewandowski He's an engineer who used
to work for Google's self driving car team before he
left the company to found his own startup called Auto
O t t O. The startups goal was to create

(01:29):
self driving trucks, something many experts believe is an inevitability
that will disrupt the shipping industry. Lewandowski's history with autonomous
vehicles dates back to two thousand four, when the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency a k A DARPA held the
Grand Challenge. This was a race that picked teams against
each other to build autonomous vehicles capable of racing against

(01:52):
the clock in a desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Lewandowski's team designed a self driving motorcycle. It didn't win,
but it did turn a lot of heads. He went
on to work with Sebastian Thrunn, who led us Stanford
University team to a victory in the second DARPA Grand Challenge.
Thrond's team, including Lewandowski, were brought on to Google after

(02:15):
the company acquired a tool the team had built that
served as one of the pillars for Google's street View project.
When Google began to explore the possibilities of autonomous vehicles,
Lewandowski was an instrumental part of the team, but he
became restless and started to look at creating a new
startup company in the self driving vehicle space in two
thousand fifteen. That was also the year Google valuated the

(02:36):
self driving car project at four point five billion dollars,
which meant Lewandowski earned a fifty million dollar bonus. Lewandowski
left Google and launched Auto in May. Later, Google executives
began to investigate Lewandowski's departure. At least one executive previously
suggested to human resources that Lewandowski be terminated from his position,

(03:00):
citing some suspect behavior. Google claims the investigation discovered that
Lewandowski had downloaded some fourteen thousand confidential files to a
personal computer before leaving Google. These files represented an enormous
amount of research and tech in the autonomous vehicle field,
including a great deal about lidar. That's a laser based

(03:20):
sensing and guidance system that Google self driving vehicles rely
upon for navigation and environment detection. But where does Uber
come in. Lewandowski apparently did some consulting work with Uber
in sixteen, and the company eventually hired him and acquired
his company Otto for a reported six hundred eighty million dollars,
though Uber disputes this amount. Google's self driving car division

(03:44):
at this point, known as Weymo, began to investigate the
possibility that Lewandowski and Uber came to this agreement largely
because of the proprietary information Lewandowski was privy to. Uber
denies these allegations. Lewandowski has executed his Fifth Amendment rights,
protecting him again self incrimination, and won't speak to authorities. Recently,
a former Uber employee named Richard Jacobs stirred the pot

(04:06):
when the U. S. Attorney's Office took a piece of
evidence from an employment dispute between Jacobs and Uber and
submitted it to the Weymo versus Uber case. That evidence
was a thirty seven page letter written by Jacobs's lawyer,
and it had some pretty damning evidence in it. In
that letter, there are claims that Uber had dedicated teams
and resources specifically to gaining access to trade secrets from competitors,

(04:31):
trade secrets like the ones included in those fourteen thousand
files Lewandowski saved to his personal machine. Uber disputes the
claims in the letter, but the company also paid a
settlement to Jacobs to the tune of four point five
million dollars, with another three million dollars going to Jacobs's lawyer.
Paying seven point five million dollars to settle a dispute

(04:51):
makes it sound like there may have been something to
worry about in those allegations. Nothing yet has been proven
in court. However, the story is even more complicated than
what I've laid out, and there are other interesting tangential elements.
For example, Lewandowski recently founded a nonprofit organization called Way
of the Future, a religious organization with the goal to

(05:12):
quote develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based
on artificial intelligence, and through understanding and worship of the Godhead,
contribute to the betterment of society end quote. Something tells
me I should probably dedicate an entire episode to just
that little nugget of news. To learn more about some
of the craziest legal battles in tech, as well as

(05:33):
how this technology actually works. Subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast,
we published twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays, and
we take a closer look at all this chaos in
an effort to make some sense out of it I'll
see you again soon.