SUPPORTING WAYVE TO MAKE SELF-DRIVING CARS A DAY-TO-DAY REALITY
Imagine artificial intelligence capable of driving in any urban environment, anywhere in the world – making self-driving cars a day-to-day reality for everyone.
That is what Wayve is creating. It’s such an exciting vision with huge potential to disrupt the industry and I’m thrilled that the Virgin Group has invested in Wayve.
Virgin has always had a restless spirit of entrepreneurship, innovation and market disruption. It’s fantastic to support solutions that have the potential to revolutionise the way things are done – whether that is travelling on Virgin Hyperloop or taking a trip in a Wayve self-driving car.
Wayve's approach to autonomous driving with AI is different to anything else on the market, and able to economically scale to 100 cities.
Several technology companies and auto manufacturers have invested billions into solving the self-driving car challenge over the last decade, with vast teams of engineers, so why aren’t we all using self-driving cars?
Wayve believes the industry has been doing too much hand-engineering and too little machine learning. Wayve is pushing the forefront of machine learning technology into the world of self-driving, learning to drive from data and experience.
It's also great to see they have a world-class team and unique, personable culture that's been built intentionally from day one, putting Wayve in a great position to pioneer autonomous driving.
Wayve CEO Alex Kendall told me how the missing piece of the self-driving puzzle is intelligent algorithms, not more sensors, rules and maps. Humans have a fascinating ability to perform complex tasks in the real world, because our brains allow us to learn quickly and transfer knowledge across our many experiences. Wayve's Driving Intelligence has similar capabilities, able to learn from millions of hours of driving experiences to move both people and goods safely and sustainably.
He added that building a self-driving system which can safely drive on roads is too difficult for humanity to hand-engineer and the team is betting on technologies like computer vision and reinforcement learning, believing that machine learning will provide the breakthrough to deliver autonomous vehicles for everyone, everywhere.
Head over to Wayve to learn more about their exciting journey.
Author - Richard Branson