Ghost, a self-driving car software company, is closing down with hundreds of layoffs

Recently, according to a number of foreign media reports, an autonomous driving company invested by OpenAI has now been closed.

Ghost Autonomy, based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 2017 as a startup developing self-driving software for automaker partners.

The company announced on its website last week that "Ghost Autonomy has shut down its global operations and shut down the company on April 3." We are proud of the substantial technological innovation and progress the Ghost team has made in achieving the software-defined consumer's mission." Given the current financing environment and the long-term investment required for self-development and commercialization, the path to long-term profitability is uncertain. We are exploring potential long-term targets for our team's innovation."

The company statement continued: "Thank you to the employees, investors and partners who have helped bring Ghost's vision to life. We really appreciate your support of Ghost along the way."

Ghost Autonomy was founded by Hayes and Volkmar Uhlig, and in the seven years since it was founded, the company has about 100 employees with offices in Mountain View, Dallas and Sydney.

Co-founder and CEO John Hayes founded Pure Storage in 2009 and took the company public six years later.

Ghost co-founder and CEO J ohn Hayes

As Chief architect of Pure, he leveraged the consumer industry's transition to flash memory to reimagine data center storage and invented ultra-fast flash storage solutions that are now operated by the world's largest cloud and e-commerce providers, financial and healthcare institutions, scientific research organizations, and governments. Hayes hopes Ghost will do the same as Pure, achieving near-perfect reliability and redefining commercial consumer hardware through the use of software.

Like many startups trying to commercialize self-driving car technology, Ghost has changed its business strategy over the years. The startup, originally called Ghost Locomotion, was founded in 2017. Two years later, the company made its public debut, With a total investment of $63.7 million from the likes of Founders Fund's Rabois, Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla and Sutter Hill Ventures' Speiser, and plans to develop a suite, Allow private passenger cars to drive themselves on highways. The company says it will offer the technology in 2020.

Ghost has been stressing that its goal is to provide technology for consumer cars purchased by ordinary customers. At the time, Ghost General Counsel Jacqueline Glassman explained: "Unlike robotaxis or delivery services, Ghost provides autonomous driving services for the cars people own and drive to work every day. Ghost offers its services in software and is designed for the mass market, working with automakers to bring autonomous driving into the mainstream."

In addition, the company is keen to point out that they are taking a different path than their competitors by focusing on general AI rather than using image localization to identify potential obstacles to ensure self-driving cars avoid them. Ghost is more focused on tracking clusters of pixels in future scenes - simply put, it doesn't matter what the obstacle is, as long as it's an obstacle and you can avoid it.

But after that 2020 deadline hit, Ghost changed its initial strategy to focus on collision prevention technology, and raised another $100 million in 2021.

The Series D round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from Founders Fund and Coatue. In an interview with TechCrunch back in 2021, Hayes said the startup hasn't completely closed the door on the consumer kit model, but instead is turning its attention to universal crash-avoidance technology to get to market faster.

Founded 7 years 0 delivery, due to investment by Open AI attention

In fact, Ghost's lofty ideals and vision are not supported by sufficiently advanced and innovative technology. Although it has raised $220 million (about 1.5 billion yuan) in its seven years of existence, it is a drop in the bucket in the extremely expensive field of autonomous driving.

"Auto companies have struggled with software development over the past decade, both in terms of execution and customer adoption," Hayes told Forbes last year. Consumers are very disappointed with new technology features in cars. Software is also actually very difficult for software companies to develop - even the giants in Silicon Valley."

Such a company, which does not have much surprising in terms of technology or founder background, is really concerned because it has been invested by the AI superstar company OpenAI.

Last November, just five months before the company shut down, the startup partnered with OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund to gain early access to Microsoft's OpenAI systems and Azure resources. Ghost has also received a $5 million investment from OpenAI. Last year, the company closed a $55 million Series A round of funding from early investors including Keith Rabois of Founders Fund and Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures.

OpenAI and Ghost announced the move at the same time, along with plans to bring large language models (the technology behind ChatGPT) to autonomous driving.

At the time, Hayes touted the company's plans to explore the use of multimodal large language models (LLM) - artificial intelligence models that can understand text and images - in autonomous driving. He believes that large language models offer a new way to understand the "long tail," adding reasoning to complex scenarios where current models are inadequate.

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's Chief operating Officer and OpenAI Startup Fund manager, said: "Multimodal models have the potential to extend the applicability of large language models to many new use cases, including autonomous driving and automobiles. Multimodal models are able to understand and draw conclusions by combining video, images and sound, and so may create a new way to understand scenes and navigate complex or unusual environments." .

Before the shutdown, Hayes also sent an email to TechCrunch saying that the company had completed a highway driving product and was moving in urban environments through what he called "last-mile delivery."

But ultimately, Hayes said, "Ghost Autonomy was unable to finance itself and achieve the level of engineering intensity required to bring the product to the consumer car market for many years."

That said, seven years and $220 million later, Ghost Autonomy still doesn't have a product to market.

How close are we to Level L5 autonomous driving?

A lot of people want faster car development cycles, but the industry needs to get it right the first time - customers won't tolerate half-finished products. Getting one of the most complex industries up and running requires an incredible amount of cross-disciplinary engineering that can only be achieved with an extraordinary amount of time.

The development of self-driving cars has not been smooth. In addition to the news of Ghost's demise, the most recent example is that Apple, one of Silicon Valley's biggest giants, is laying off more than 600 employees in Santa Clara, according to a state filing that laid off employees at eight of Apple's offices in Santa Clara.

Last fall, GM's Cruise self-driving unit came under regulatory scrutiny after one of its vehicles hit and dragged a pedestrian, leading the U.S. automaker to lay off workers and cut $1 billion in spending. But GM CEO Mary Barra said in February that "self-driving technology offers tremendous benefits" and that the company has "extremely valuable assets."

According to a report by research firm GlobalData, drivers will not be able to experience the roads of fully autonomous vehicles for at least 20 years, and the road to autonomous vehicles at level L4 and above is "likely to be slow."

Level L5 autonomy involves self-driving cars that don't require any human-computer interaction, meaning they won't have steering wheels or pedals when eventually deployed.

"However, it is reasonable to assume that the new Level 4 vehicles introduced in 2035 will be substantially better than those introduced in 2025, so the path to Level 5 is likely to be gradual," the report states.

Reference link:

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/driverless-car-software-company-shuts-down-in-mountain-view/

https://medium.com/authority-magazine/vehicles-of-the-future-john-hayes-of-ghost-autonomy-on-the-leading-edge-technologi es-that-are-57bad9c33cc4