Two years in the past, Xiaodi Hou was ousted from his place as CEO of TuSimple, an autonomous trucking startup he co-founded that has since shut down U.S. operations and delisted from the inventory change — and, in an odd twist, the corporate has pivoted to AI animation and gaming in China.
Now Hou is again with a brand new Houston-based self-driving truck startup referred to as Bot Auto that lately made its public debut armed with $20 million in pre-Sequence A funds. In a manner, Hou is getting the AV band again collectively; nearly all of his 40-person group consists of former TuSimple engineers who had been laid off in a number of rounds of cuts that hit the U.S. group.
Whereas the mission and far of the group are the identical, Hou claims the underlying technical structure is totally different. The founder says Bot Auto has entered the second wave of autonomous car know-how, the place the final couple of years of AI developments have made it simpler and cheaper to speed up AV growth.
“We basically developed a machine learning infrastructure with eight people in four months,” Hou advised TechCrunch. “In my last life, that probably would have taken more than 100 people and a year to develop.”
AV 2.0 period
Hou isn’t the one founder speaking in regards to the AV 2.0 period, which is seeing renewed investor curiosity regardless of the quite a few self-driving startups which have fallen.
TechCrunch lately reported on autonomous supply startup Nuro’s shift towards a extra streamlined AI structure. Autonomous trucking startup Waabi, which raised $200 million this 12 months, has additionally touted a extra superior AI mannequin. And Wayve, which raised $1.05 billion this 12 months, is creating a self-learning system.
One of many AI developments that has helped AV firms on this second wave, together with Bot Auto, is transformers — the identical structure behind giant language fashions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Hou stated transformers permit Bot Auto’s gigantic neural community to soak up information from totally different sensors — like cameras, radar, and lidar — to create a “world model” of the car’s environment and concurrently acknowledge objects and site visitors indicators and plan pathways.
The neural community, which Hou refers to as a “foundation-to-all” mannequin, stops in need of decision-making. That’s the sort of data-in-decision-out circulate that occurs in an end-to-end mannequin, which Hou says leads to the black field impact. As a substitute, the decision-making is finished through a “principle-based system,” which Hou says results in “explainable AI.”
Bot Auto may velocity up the method of knowledge assortment and processing by way of pre-training, based on Hou, which includes coaching neural networks on giant datasets earlier than they’re fine-tuned for particular duties or environments.
“Pre-training is the key to fast-forward training and jumpstarting deep learning endeavors without needing to accumulate data for years and label it all by hand,” Hou stated. He famous that reinforces in supervised self-learning have allowed Bot Auto to pre-train fashions from unlabeled information with out human suggestions, which hastens the method considerably.
Hou stated Bot Auto additionally doesn’t have to consider learn how to orchestrate GPUs or do high-performance information storage as a result of he can faucet open supply instruments that weren’t obtainable when he headed TuSimple.
For instance, Bot Auto makes use of Kubernetes as its cloud working system to automate nearly all essential data-related duties like large-scale simulation and mining highway check information, based on Hou.
Specializing in operations
Taking the brunt work out of constructing the AV infrastructure means Bot Auto can focus extra on the core enterprise of bringing AVs to market, based on Hou.
“Of course we are always trying to stay abreast of the best technology, but we are not here to show off the technology,” Hou stated. “We are here to facilitate operations, to make it happen. That’s why the operations are in Houston.”
Texas has change into the chief in autonomous trucking, and never simply because the state’s sunny skies make it simpler to check there. Texas is residence to among the most profitable freight routes within the nation, together with the I-45 hall between Houston and Dallas. Each Waabi and Kodiak Robotics are testing vehicles on these routes day by day.
And now so is Bot Auto.
Hou stated his startup has begun testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in Texas with a human security operator within the entrance seat and has already secured two letters of intent from prospects within the logistics and delivery trade. Bot Auto can be heading in the right direction to finish a hub-to-hub demo in 2025, Hou stated.
Regardless of the scalability of its foundational fashions, Bot Auto is being cautious on the subject of scaling up operations on the bottom.
“We are going to contain ourselves in a very cost-effective way,” Hou stated, noting that buyers in 2024 are solely investing in actual know-how that may be sustainable. “We have a very small operating fleet. We focus on a small number of lanes, and then only after we know how to save money and operate efficiently, then we’ll start to scale up.”
Not with out its challenges
Regardless of its wins, Bot Auto will doubtless face some headwinds.
Traders could also be brightening to the concept of a brand new period of AV, however they haven’t forgotten the trials of the previous couple years, which incorporates the shutdown of Embark Vans and Waymo’s autonomous freight enterprise.
And, after all, there’s the failure of TuSimple, the worst of which occurred after Hou had been ousted as its chief.
TuSimple’s board had voted to oust Hou after an inner investigation revealed some overlap between the corporate and Chinese language startup Hydron, which Hou’s co-founder Mo Chen based to provide autonomous-ready hydrogen vehicles in 2021 across the time TuSimple went public within the U.S.
Such a public firing, and one made spicier by geopolitical tensions, may additionally give buyers pause, though Hou has maintained he was let go with out trigger — a declare that sources on the firm have backed as much as TechCrunch up to now. He additionally stated that have taught him to not attempt to straddle the traces of unfriendly international locations, which is likely one of the the explanation why Bot Auto is a completely U.S.-based firm with no ties to China in anyway, based on Hou.
When requested why Hou didn’t launch Bot Auto in China as a substitute, the place laws are extra favorable for AV firms, he stated the upper value of labor for truck drivers within the U.S. will increase the potential worth for autonomous driving.
“It was a business decision,” he stated.
Then there’s the specter of authorized motion from TuSimple itself. After being fired, Hou maintained his board seat at TuSimple however ended up resigning in March 2023 after the board accused him of attempting to poach employees for his new enterprise. Hou denied this on the time and advised TechCrunch he solely went public along with his determination to begin a brand new firm after he left the board. He stated the TuSimple alum who make up his employees at present got here to him out of loyalty and a need to maintain engaged on AVs after being laid off.
Whether or not these accusations will resurface is unclear. Though Cheng Lu, TuSimple’s CEO, advised TechCrunch the corporate would doubtless sue Hou for alleged IP and commerce secrets and techniques theft.
Hou stated he’s not anxious.
“Everyone sues everyone here,” he stated. “And I think after telling you about the technologies we’re building, most of the things we’re doing weren’t even happening before 2021.”
