All of Ford’s crushes with Artificial Intelligence
After the escape from the former Argo startup, Ford founds the newco Latitude Ai: the autopilot of the Americans will no longer be shared with the Germans of Volkswagen
Not even five months ago Ford came out in the worst way from the partnership with the half-European half-US startup Argo AI, founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Randers in which Ford had invested 1 billion dollars while the Germans of Volkswagen over 2.6 billion , of which 1 billion between the purchase of shares and capital contributions while the remainder in the form of transfer of the Autonomous Intelligent Driving GmbH of Munich. An abrupt and sudden "U" turn capable of killing a joint venture that had raised the value of the startup to over 7 billion.
THE END OF ARGO AI
“In coordination with our shareholders, the decision has been made that Argo AI will not continue its mission as a company. Many of the employees will have the opportunity to continue working on automated driving technology with Ford or Volkswagen, while for others the employment relationship will unfortunately end", the meager press release to which the news of the closure of the innovative reality was entrusted .
WE START AGAIN FROM HERE
Not even a semester has passed and now Ford has founded a new company, Latitude Ai, which as the name suggests will have the purpose of developing artificial intelligence solutions to be combined with the vehicles of the US manufacturer.
WHAT FORD WILL DO WITH LATITUDE AI
As promised, Ford has hired approximately 550 employees from Argo AI in the fields of machine learning and robotics, cloud platforms, mapping, sensors and computing systems, test operations, systems and engineering of the safety.
The newco Latitude Ai will be wholly owned by Ford: Sammy Omari , executive director of ADAS technologies at Ford, will also serve as CEO of Latitude. Peter Carr has been named chief technology officer, overseeing technical and product development at Latitude, and David Gollob has been named president, with responsibility for business operations.
Latitude Ai is headquartered in Pennsylvania, but will obviously work side by side with the main engineering centers that Ford has almost everywhere in the States: in Dearborn (Michigan) and Palo Alto (California), as well as on the test track in Greenville , South Carolina.
Ford's intention is clear not to throw away the progress made with Argo while exploiting the sprint of BlueCruise, which has already accumulated over 50 million miles of tests with robot vehicles, employing the staff of the former startup highly specialized in machine learning , robotics, software, cloud, sensors and systems engineering, in an effort to remain competitive on autonomous driving.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/ford-intelligenza-artificiale/ on Tue, 07 Mar 2023 06:36:34 +0000.