After Settling With Uber, Waymo Faces Bigger Challenges<br />“Waymo has the partnerships and technology needed to launch the world’s first self-driving service this year,” a Waymo spokesman said in a statement, pointing to how the company has fully self-driving cars on some public roads, has secured vehicles from Fiat Chrysler<br />and has partnered with Avis, AutoNation, Lyft and others.<br />With that brain drain in mind, the Uber lawsuit can also be seen as a fight against a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski,<br />who also took his services elsewhere — first to Otto, a start-up he created, and then to Uber just six months later.<br />“We can build on top of that revolution.”<br />In 2011, Google was among the first companies to build a research lab dedicated to these rapidly evolving techniques,<br />and a number of researchers from this lab eventually moved on to the Google self-driving car project.<br />Much of the artificial intelligence technology that has come out of Waymo’s work<br />and research run by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has made it easier for companies, even start-ups, to compete.
