Can a driverless car really cope with London traffic & is the big AI bromance over?
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The Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by IBM. AI can change the way you do business. But the thing is, Katie, some organizations often don't know where to start. Can't they just ask the AI tool what to ask it? Not helping, Katie. IBM believe almost any organization of any size can get started on the road to productivity with the right tech. So IBM has an AI assistant as one way to get started.

They're trained on your business processes, helping organizations to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, or perhaps use an AI assistant to improve customer service by giving you the language and context specific to your business.

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So Danny, we should say for listeners who can't see us, we've both turned up to the recording of this podcast today looking quite sad. Well, just like a couple of loser tech reporters. Show me your T-shirt. Sit up a little bit.

You've got Google Cloud blazing across your chest. Yeah, and you know what's cool? It's not just any tech swag. This is like extra soft cotton. Okay. Don't be jealous, okay? I would be jealous, but I can go one better because I've got... Can you see this? Oh, which of that there? Nvidia GTC Paris with a picture of the Eiffel Tower.

And the San and in a sort of Monet style with GTC and large letters at the bottom. So very sad. It's like a, it's like a, it's like a concert shirt, you know, like, Oh man, I saw, I saw Jensen on tour.

I saw him in Paris. No, I saw him in San Jose. I did look on eBay and these GTC t-shirts go up to about 80 quid. You're not serious. Well, I'm obviously not going to sell it because it's too precious. I mean, obviously. Yeah.

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Katie Prescott. And me, Danny Fortson. Coming up today, we talk about AI talent wars and the odd, you know, $100 million salaries being thrown around. What's $100 million between friends?

Plus, Anthropics big win, kind of, over use of books and copyrighted materials and training their AI models. And I go on a drive, but without a driver, but with the boss of a driverless car company, Wave in London, to find out if this is the end of driving as we know it in the UK. But first, Katie, a story you wrote about this very week.

Is the bromance, this famous bromance between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella dead over kaput? Or as you put it more kindly, under pressure.

I think that might have been subbed by somebody else. But anyway, yeah, this is an absolutely amazing story. If you think of the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, the strategic partnership, as they called it when it started back in 2019, and Microsoft put a billion dollars into OpenAI, which, you know, turned out to be quite a good bet, you might say. Yeah.

At the time, they didn't get a stake in the company, partly because of this very strange structure that OpenAI had as a not-for-profit. But they did get a share of the profits, albeit a capped one. And now OpenAI is fiddling around with its structure and has taken on a lot more funding. And it's got people like SoftBank involved. And their valuation is $300 billion.

They need to renegotiate their relationship with Microsoft. And so, as you say, this bromance between Sam and Satya is suddenly a little colder than it once was. And so, but what does that... How does that...

manifest itself. Is it like a whisper campaign? Is it like, you know, like, oh, these things are leaking out and there's some interesting well-sourced stories about how sad it is. That's exactly it. This is no Elon Musk fight with Donald Trump. This is absolutely leaks behind the scenes about what's going on in these negotiations. But I think the most fascinating thing about it is it all bizarrely hinges on AGI. Yeah.

Right? The definition of. It's the definition of it.

But also it is a sort of nebulous concept, which I find really interesting. Because as we know, Sam Altman says that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. And it has a definition for it, which is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Okay, following? It had this fascinating clause in its contract with Microsoft, which basically said once it hit...

this point and once it got to AGI yeah Microsoft would no longer have rights to open AI's stuff or anything once it hit that point beyond like in other words because from memory Microsoft basically is part of their investment which is why Satya Nadella has such leverage is that like

They have free reign to do whatever they want with OpenAI's code, with their agents, with whatever. Exactly. Up until they hit AGI. But then what happens? What happens when we hit this magical point? So the contract says it can stop sharing new models with Microsoft. And obviously that's really, really problematic because people will want the new models because they will be AGI. They'll be the most advanced. Yeah.

And Microsoft's value from OpenAI, as you say, is in having access to all these models. It didn't have a stake in the business, but it did have access to the models. And so now they're renegotiating that relationship. And Microsoft wants a stake in OpenAI in the new world of OpenAI. Right, right, right, right. And it wants to can this AGI nonsense. And it's really interesting when you look at what Sam and Satya have been saying about it.

Sam Altman always says it's around the corner. We're on the cusp of it. Whereas Satya Nadella back in February rather poo-pooed the fact that it was coming. He said, us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking. I love it. Well, because of course they're both talking their book. He's like, AGI? That's never going to happen. What's that? I get access forever and ever and ever.

But it is interesting, like when Elon Musk sued OpenAI over their conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit and him kind of going to war with Sam Altman in his lawsuit, he said, look, they've already reached AGI.

And so he was trying to say that point has already arrived. If you look at the capabilities of these models, which, you know, is a stretch. I mean, they're helpful, but they're definitely not like the super intelligence that's better at humans than everything. That is not true. The important thing, though, is who gets to decide. And in the clause at the moment, it's the open AI board. So you can see why Microsoft decides.

isn't that happy about it? It's interesting. And I guess ultimately, I think you're going to have to come down to some type of benchmarking, which is why there's, you know, there's this thing we mentioned before called humanity's last exam, where this organization has brought together like the top experts in all these different fields come up with all these really complex questions and said, when AI can basically ace this test,

That is when they're calling it humanity's last exam, because then you're like, oh, OK, well, we've been surpassed by the machines.

And it's this test that is kind of constantly being kind of built up and involved as they get more experts from around the world to come up with their biggest, most naughty questions in their given field. But I think that maybe it'll be something like that that ultimately defines this. I suspect in the new contract, they'll try and just get rid of it altogether. It's, as you say, so hard to define. And unless it applies to everybody else, all the other partners...

Yeah. It doesn't maybe make sense in this, in this new AI world, but it does feel like open AI is soaring above its master, which is quite funny. Yeah. And it is, it's a, it feels like almost like love. Go on. That's how beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like somebody who you're just like, you know, if I'm the creator of this thing, I'm like, yes, this thing's amazing. It's, it's like, it can do everything. And you know, somebody else might be like, meh.

Not for me. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I get the impression Microsoft has tried to fall in love with other companies, but no one's quite as special. Exactly. Exactly. Speaking of dating around and trying to land new partners in this crazy AI world, our mate Mark Zuckerberg, he's been throwing his money around. Obviously, he spent...

$14 billion on Scale AI, which is this company that helps train AI models and label data and all this stuff. But there's been the story during the rounds that he's been offering nine-figure pay packages to AI engineers. Have you got the call? Weirdly, no. No? No, I did send him, just cold emailed him my Meatball Mania video game that I vibe-coded. Okay.

With your bank details at the bottom. Yeah, I'm just like, you don't even have to respond. I'm just like, direct deposit, my dude.

Weirdly, that hasn't happened yet. I'm checking my bank account every 15 minutes. Because apparently he's trying to work out on his list how people like being approached. Does Danny Fortson prefer a WhatsApp or an email? I just prefer the money. Do you? And then you'll turn up at 9 o'clock on Monday? No. I'm in demand. Have you seen my video game? I'm like, I sit here, I work my magic, and you pay me all the money. Okay.

Sam on one phone, Zassar on the other. Exactly. But anyway, so yeah, so I haven't got the call from Mark, but he has managed to poach apparently at least four senior open AI engineers with these offers of, yeah, apparently he's offering up to a hundred million dollars to people, which is just clearly the, all of these guys think this is the biggest thing ever.

since sliced bread. Because if you're like, well, if I'm offering $100 million to individuals, but the prize is trillions, it's a drop in the bucket, of course. And it's like, there's this whole race mentality. Who's going to get there first? Who's going to build the best model? Who's going to kind of steal a march on everybody else? OpenAI clearly is in the lead, but it's really quite extraordinary. And it makes the dot-com boom, which where I started my career out here, look, I mean, the numbers and just what's happening here are so incredible.

If you had a time machine, do you think it would be sensible to go back to your university days and maybe do a PhD in machine learning? Swerving the humanities. Of course it would. And you can tell your future self. Well, we've chosen the wrong career, but I kind of knew that at the time. But I'm like, I'm just my mind does not is not quantitative like that. But even like, for example, like Mira Murady, who was another OpenA founder who left.

She just raised $2 billion for her startup. $2 billion, no product, no revenue. It's like a PowerPoint deck and her and some smart people from OpenAI. That's like your starter. That's like your series A or your seed round is $2 billion.

And most of that money, I'm sure, is just going to get recycled right back into all the big hyperscalers, which is why Microsoft and Amazon and Google are doing so well. Because everybody's just taking all the money they raise and then paying for space in their data centers to train and run all of these models.

So it's a little bit like I'm a washing machine, you know, and any money is left is just spent on the engineers, on the people building these systems. I guess the slight danger as well is that you do end up consolidating the talent in the hands of the few. Again, I was speaking to one of the AR unicorns in London about this and they laughed when I said, were they thinking of paying those sorts of salaries? Of course they did because nobody else can. But it just means that

maybe unlike in the past where you take a stake in the company and then you'd hope it would grow and you'd make your future wealth that way you can just go straight to meta now i'm just so waiting for my my email from mark hold on let me just maybe it's in your spam while you while you tee up the next news item i'm just gonna see if mark has texted me check check your facebook messenger as well oh yeah because i know he forces it out no still nothing from my guy

He's weird. He's busy. Don't worry. Just keep holding onto your phone. So I really, really want to talk about Copyright as our last story. And that's partly because there's been this huge case going on here in the high court between Getty Images and Stability AI, which finished on Monday. And has there been any news out of that? Because I know that was like the big one.

at least over on that side of the pond. Exactly. It is really the big one and the only one as the government here grapples with what to do about this copyright issue. So Getty Images alleged that Stability AI was using their material in their machine, in early versions of their machine, and that you could thus generate images with the Getty watermark on, including...

pornographic and inappropriate images, which they said damaged the brand. So they dropped a number of bits of the case as it went along. And it ended up being about really their trademark by the end, the Getty trademark and what the damage that was being done to the brand. But it also really interestingly, and this is a bit geeky, but bear with me. They were initially looking at whether the models had been trained in the UK and trained abroad. They dropped

the one that accused stability of training in the UK, but they kept the abroad one with the issue being that if the judge finds spaghetti, even if businesses have trained, AI businesses have trained their models abroad and then brought it into the UK, it could still breach somebody's copyright here. Because you're bringing in pirated materials. You're like, I used to live in Spain and you'd be like,

walking through the plaza and there'd be all these guys like selling like pirated CDs on a blanket, you know, then they can like pick it up in a moment and run if the police came. But it was like, you're selling stolen goods, right?

In another country, basically. That's exactly right. And it's so interesting you use that example because that's exactly what Stability have argued, that it's for physical goods and not for things like AI. So the verdict's expected in a few months and that will give everyone a lot of clarity into the direction of travel over copyright. But there'd been two rulings at the same time in the US. Yeah, the big one was Anthropic and it was mostly a victory for them.

In that, you know, they were similarly being sued by authors who are saying, you basically stole our stuff without our asking. And you've used it to train your models. And that is a copyright violation. And the judge said, basically, no.

Broadly speaking, no. With some nuance. So first of all, Anthropical's like, they used 7 million pirated books. And that seems like not up for debate. That is a fact that has come out through the course of all these hearings. That still needs to be adjudicated and will be.

What they then did is last year, they hired somebody from Google, the person who did their big books project, which was also very controversial. You know, Google was wanting to put every book on the internet, digitize it, put on the internet. So what they did under this guy's guidance, apparently, is buy millions of physical books, extract the pages physically from the book, scan them, turning each page into a digital document,

And then using that to train their models. And then afterwards, they shredded all the books. Horrible thing to do. Yeah. But that buying of a book and then doing with it what you will is why in this ruling, he's like, basically, this is fair use. You're fine as long as you're using this as inspiration. As long as you're purchasing these copyrighted materials and then doing with it what you will, you're good.

The pirated books case, which I think will that will continue. But like if you just buy every book on the planet and scan it,

That apparently is okay, according to this ruling. Wow. I was speaking to a lawyer about this while I was covering the Getty case, and they said the damages that Anthropic faces over these pirated books could be existential. He said it could be significant, even existential, which is really interesting. But it is nuanced, isn't it? And it feels like everybody's trying to

fiddle their way through it at the moment and no one's coming up with a satisfactory answer right let's take a little break then after the break katie you get driven on a driverless drive around london like toad of toad hall the times tech podcast is sponsored by ibm ai can change the way you do business but organizations often don't know where to start

IBM believes that organizations of any size have the potential to improve productivity with the right tech. IBM's AI assistants are one way to get started. They are trained on your business processes and can integrate with your apps. So IBM's AI platform, WatsonX, can help organizations of all sizes to get started on or scale their AI journey. You can find out more at IBM.com.

Danny, I've got a brilliant idea for your next date night when you come to London. All right, hit me. So you could get in a driverless car and go around the streets of Soho on a Friday evening while the drunken patrons of the local theatres and pubs spill out onto chaotic single lane roads. That sounds incredibly romantic.

Hopefully I'll see a couple of people barfing in the gutters. You're really lucky. But it's what today's guest likes to do apparently. He's the boss and co-founder of Wave, the UK's answer to Waymo. And you can see if you founded a driverless car company, seeing your vehicles in action would be quite satisfying. But-

But at the moment, unless you go on a date with Alex Kendall, the boss, I think this is going to be tricky to organize for you because we don't yet have driverless cars in London. I mean, it was already struggling. Romantic was doing a lot of work there, but now this sounds far less romantic. I don't think Mrs. F is going to go for that. Me, you and a random tech CEO, babe. Let's do it. Wearing my Google Cloud t-shirt. Yeah.

I mean, but like, okay. Romance aside, one of the perks of our job is obviously sometimes we get access to things that aren't yet open to the public. And, and,

A few weeks ago, I got to drive around London in one of Wave's driverless cars while talking to Alex. And it was pretty cool. Do you want to tell me a little bit about Wave with a Y? Because I think it's fair to say people know less about them than Waymo with a Y. Yeah, so Wave was founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and another PhD student in Cambridge, which

And they had this idea that rather than train a car to drive along certain roads and follow a path, that it would learn through artificial intelligence by being fed information. And that's exactly what they did in Cambridge. So they had a little car, a Renault Twizy, that looks a little bit like a golf buggy. And they worked on automating it and so that it could drive itself around the block.

Now, fast forward to last year and SoftBank came in with a billion dollars along with NVIDIA and Microsoft. And Microsoft had been a previous investor in the company. And Wave is now one of the UK's top AI businesses. And it's recognized around the world. So they've now got offices in San Francisco, out in Japan.

These are the links to SoftBank in Stuttgart. And it's expanding at a rate of knots, largely due to this enormous bazooka investment from Massillon. Fascinating. Well, I want to hear about your ride. And then because, you know, we're living a little bit further in the future here because we have Waymo out here, which is everywhere. Probably.

Yeah, no, it really is so unusual here. It was quite bamboozling as you're here. I'm interested to hear what the interview sounds like because I was so overexcited. I forgot most of my questions. LAUGHTER

So this was the second time I've been in a wave car and I was lucky enough to go in one when they got that mega funding round last year. And just to set the scene before we play it, waves based in a large office on what is kind of a scruffy road north of King's Cross. And it almost looks like it should be a garage or a petrol station. And we got into one of the cars, which are all sitting out on the forecourt.

Alex and I sat in the back and there was a driver in the front, right? Because at the moment you have to have a safety driver in a car in the UK. And this is not an Elon Musk man with the hands on his knees in the passenger seat. This is sitting behind the wheel, but they have their hands kind of cupped under the wheel and not touching it. So if something happens, they can step in. Hands on knees or hands cupped? Hands cupped! Hands cupped!

I'd love to make the laws around this. Great. So we were in the back. There was a chap in the front, a safety driver, but he didn't have to touch the car once, I should say. And we went down into central London. So if you think Kings Cross is the north, we cut straight through into the centre past the British Museum and those little higgledy-piggledy streets around there, which were full of kids because it was half term, and Great Ormond Street Hospital, which was unloading

and all sorts of things. So it was a proper London experience, I have to say. Well, let's hear it.

One of the things I found really scary about coming out in the car last time, well scary is the wrong word, but kind of challenging when you're getting your head around being in a driverless car, is turning onto the York Road. It's not an easy road to drive on as a driver, let alone with a safety driver. Well, let's see. It's a busy road to turn on here. It has always made me wonder, why did you choose to be in King's Cross? Well, we were starting the company in Cambridge and as we were growing and looking for a space, we

Ironically, we wanted to find a space that was really important to us to co-locate the car and our team so that everyone can go and test and get in the car whenever they want and see what the autonomy is like. And actually, Kings Cross, we found the best spot in central London, near where we all lived, with a warehouse that could house our team and our fleet. Because it...

Sorry, should we talk about the technology? 'Cause you've just pressed the button to make the car autonomous. Is that what's just happened? - That's right. We're sitting in here in one of our wave autonomous vehicles in central London. Our safety operator just turned the system on. We have a safety operator behind the wheel monitoring the system, but the AI is now driving the car. Speed, steering, indicators, the brakes.

everything about the car is now being driven by the AI. But my question about why King's Cross was, I guess, also, you would think that a car company might want to be somewhere more in the countryside with more open roads, with easier roads to drive on. Was that was the challenge part of the reason for being here? Since the beginning of Wave, we've tried to try to take on the hardest problems first in building this because the autonomous driving industry many years ago started in places like

Phoenix, Arizona, which is a city in the US and where there's a grid-like array of streets. The sun always shines. I think they have like one or two rainy days a year.

and one of the easiest places to learn to drive. Whereas you come to central London and it's medieval origins of cities with lots of merging and roundabouts and of course the weather that adds complexity here. So coming here forced us to build something that would scale, forced us to build a system that was intelligent to not just drive with protected red and green arrows on every intersection but

I actually learn how to navigate and predict how others will move. An interesting stat, there are, compared to San Francisco where there are lots of self-driving cars, London has about seven times more jaywalkers. Is that right? Yeah.

The hazards are everywhere. Not to mention the line bikes, right? I mean, that must be an extra. Well, just now we've already just driven through a pedestrian crossing with someone darting out from behind a vehicle. There's a line bike coming around beside us and now we're just stopping here at a red light. So what's happening with the technology? What is the car...

How is this working? How do you sum it up for people? Yeah, it's a core belief that we've had that autonomous driving is really an AI problem. It's a problem of how do we build a system that we can trust to drive through scenarios that may never have seen before? Because, of course, we can collect all the training data that we need in the world to understand the diversity of where we drive.

But at the end of the day, you're always gonna see things where, you know, how people and cars are on the road or the weather, it's always gonna be different, even if you drive down the same road twice. And so the key thing here is how do we have a system that's intelligent enough to deal with things it may never have seen before?

And for us, building an AI system was how to do this. So since the beginning of the company, we've been building a technology that learns to drive, that learns the behaviors you might expect. Like here, we're just slowing down for a speed bump. We haven't told the car, if there's a speed bump, you should slow down. Instead, it's learned from behavior and feedback that that's a policy it should learn. It's learned how to go through traffic lights. And that means that

it can drive through any traffic light it sees rather than specifically just ones that have been mapped or pre-coded how it should navigate through them. - I loved your stat about the number of jaywalkers compared to driverless cars because every time I speak to my podcast co-host in San Francisco, he talks about going in a driverless car. I'm like, you might as well be on a different planet because obviously we just don't have them here in that way yet or that experience. And I think the UK government has now said it's gonna be 2027.

So they'll be on the road? Last year, we were able to help the government pass the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which puts in place the legislation to legalize autonomous driving here in the UK.

Originally, it was meant to be enacted, the actual regulation implemented by 2026. It's been pushed back a year to 2027, and we now expect this to all come in place by the end of 2027. Because it's the second time I've done this, I definitely felt more comfortable this time. And I wanted to ask as well, do you feel like the tack has advanced in the last year?

- Massively, Katie. I mean, a year ago we were just driving in central London. In fact, probably couldn't have done some of the complexity we'll see on the road today. But in the last year, we have learned to now drive on highways at high speeds. We now drive across the world in Germany, in Europe, in Japan, in Stuttgart. Even, that was quite interesting. Do you see the pedestrian that was next to the crossing?

A lot of self-driving cars will stop if there's a pedestrian anywhere near the crossing. But one of the things we got very good at is predicting from the pedestrian's body language. You know, how are they shaping? Is their body language look like they're gonna cross or not? - Wow. - And to be able to predict. - So the sensors are looking at the people and how they're reacting to them. - We've developed a world model. The AI is able to actually predict and understand how the world will evolve with very complex scenarios. So in that instance, the pedestrian's body language was not facing the crossing, they were just walking past. So we didn't stop, we just drove through as you would.

Whereas if they were shaping to cross the crossing, of course, we'd yield for them. And learning that kind of level of intelligence is really awesome. But over the last year, we've grown orders of magnitude and performance and then spread out to now drive all around the world from the autobahns in Germany to downtown Tokyo, for example. Actually, in the last 90 days, we've now driven in over 70 different cities, which is a pretty remarkable statistic. Wow.

Because it's been a year since I saw you last, and that was on the occasion of you getting the billion dollar investment led by SoftBank. Is that what's precipitated so much of the technological change? We can talk about the company's growth in a minute. Yeah, I mean, that investment, of course, was a huge inflection point for us, gave us the ability to build out

everything required to turn this technology prototype into a robust product that can be trusted across the automotive industry. So there was a huge build-out in turning this into a reliable product that can actually operate in consumer and commercial vehicles. And then, of course, a lot of the technology investments that we have been pioneering for the last eight years, I think, have just keep landing wins. You talked about pedestrians' behavior. Are there other things that have been really challenging to...

to train the vehicle to do that you've managed to? Predominantly the hard thing to do in this is multi-agent interaction is dealing and predicting how others are going to move. And actually driving requires a lot of negotiation. I mean, consider if you're in a crowd of people and you need to nudge your way through or if you're in a merge situation, if you don't negotiate and if you sit back and wait for space, you might be stuck there for maybe an hour. Although I was in Tokyo two months ago when we launched our cars there for the first time. It

What was cool to see was a Japanese police officer jumped out in front of us and actually put his hand up and said, "Stop, wait," and wanted to let an emergency vehicle out from the side of the road. Our car, we hadn't had any specific training data from Japan yet,

but from its general intelligence was able to understand to stop for that police officer. And then after they let the car out, then they waved us through and actually recognized that signal and then drove forward. And so the sheer general purpose intelligence that we're seeing emerging in this AI is quite remarkable and is very quickly proving itself to be able to drive all around the world.

Talk to me then about how the investment has changed the business in the last year. So you've expanded now office in San Francisco, Germany, Japan as well. That's right. So there has been a year of global geo expansion. Of course, the investments given our partners the trust to work with us because launching a product in automotive requires years of development and then years of expansion. And we have that business plan fully funded and the runway to actually be trusted in the automotive space.

and of course continue to grow our team and and uh it's no secret there's an ai talent war going on at the moment and the expertise that we've been able to bring on board and that i i'm so thrilled to work with at wave has been awesome one of my favorite things to do is go autonomous driving on a

say on a Friday night through Soho where you have all of the people coming out of the theatre very very busy you can see some amazing scenarios there and just the sheer intelligence of our system to safely navigate through those kind of scenarios when of course you have all the drunken people spilling out of bars and shows that you might expect I can see people just walk out into the road oh there we go can't she

Smooth through. Confident. Yeah. Confident driving. Does the car have a personality? Something you can personalize. You can prompt the AI and ask it to drive in the style that you might want. Aggressive London shouty? Your words, not mine, but if you want to drive that way, of course, our AI understands the envelope of what's safe and what the boundaries are. Oh, someone spotted it. There's a guy outside who's grinning at the car.

Yeah, these things are still a bit novel in London, but I hope really soon everyone gets to experience. So 2027, this is the plan that in the UK we'll see autonomous vehicles on the road. So in 2020, to be specific, in 2027, it is the government's plan to have legal frameworks implemented so that you can get approval to run robotaxis or driverless vehicles. Okay.

We have not yet publicly shared our date that we'll be launching such a capability, but we're working on it as quickly as we can and we're really excited to do so with that regulatory approval. And have you got a sense, and we don't have to talk specifically about WAVE, but when you think driverless cars in London might become so common that you won't see that chap stopping and going, hey, what's

that man got his hands on the wheel. As soon as they're legal, I mean, as I said, we'll be working on this as quickly as we can. We've got some great partners from the automotive companies that we work with, of course, Uber, who's a really great partner of ours. And we're working together on as quickly as we can bringing this technology to the world.

and doing it in a way that's safe and scalable, which may take it beyond some of the limited deployments we've seen so far in cities like Shanghai and San Francisco. Just to be clear, so Wave works, your technology is then embedded in partner cars, so in, sorry, with car makers. Essentially, you've just signed a deal with Nissan, for example. That's right. So we're building a

the embodied AI platform across different manufacturers and operators of different robots. So whether this is a car company or, you know, other form of mobility service or manufacturer, we've built a foundation model that's really good at understanding how to navigate through complex scenes, how to drive safely, how to understand the physical world. That's embodied AI, AI in the physical world.

And this foundation model is general purpose. So we can optimize and deploy it in a driver assistance application in a consumer vehicle, or we can deploy it in a robo taxi or in another form of robotics. And this is this platform that we want to partner with the world's most innovative fleets and automakers to allow them to create

autonomous products. So first, that'll be with driver assistance products, then robo-taxi and autonomous mobility, and then, of course, many other autonomous machines that can make our lives more safe and sustainable. What are your thoughts on where we'll be with car ownership? And something like, gosh, there's this bike just crossed over. He's not wearing a helmet. But in terms of... And our car safely responded. And it did, yeah. Yielded for them. Because...

In London, it feels to me like car ownership is declining. Do you see your technology in cars that are going to be used by organisations like Uber or do you think people will continue to own cars? I think that's a really interesting question. The first thing is I think multimodal transportation and different options is going to be really important to people. So I think it's interesting to argue about the distribution across different modes, but I think there's going to be a non-zero amount of every mode and that's important.

trains, bikes, walking, micro mobility, public transport, shared transport, personally owned transport. I think we need an arrange to meet the diversity of people's needs. That's the first thing I think is really, really key here. I cycle to work every day and I think I hope cycling is still a key part of the way we get around. Yeah. But I do think that autonomy provides a number of opportunities. You know, think about

when you improve road safety, what that lets you do for transportation, improve accessibility, reduce the cost, of course, by making vehicles more highly utilized. Today, cars sit idle on average 97% of the time. - Is that right? Wow. - Yeah. And so being able to utilize these vehicles better, to be able to run them more efficiently, I mean, that opens up many more applications, whether this is lower volume, more frequent public transport, or maybe even personalized public transport on the route.

I think we will see an increase in ride hailing and shared car ownership. I think that's natural. Imagine if your Uber costs a quarter of the cost it costs today, right? I mean, I think that would be if a £30 or $30 Uber was all of a sudden 10 or 15 pounds or dollars. That really does swing in favour, I think, the availability of that transport that can be made more efficient.

And then even like how much space we waste with car parking. In London, 10 times the size of Hyde Park is taken up by car parks. And when you have cars that aren't sitting idle but are constantly utilized, you can turn those car parks into green parks and make that space more efficient. So I think there's a ton of changes we are going to see the way we move around cities, not to mention by reducing accidents, we can, of course, reduce congestion and make actually the journey faster and more effective. Do you think that...

it's likely that car autonomous cars powered by waves technology are going to be on the roads in other cities before they are in London. I mean, it's easier for you to deploy them in San Francisco where they're already. Uh, we haven't committed to, to which city will be first yet, but I, uh,

i i can comment in the general sense i mean london we've got maybe home turf advantage here uh so there there's an attraction on that point but uh we are seeing that the regulatory landscape in the us is more advanced we are also seeing automotive manufacturers in general in asia and japan and china and the united states are certainly further ahead than those in europe

So I think there's going to be some interesting factors as to how this technology goes out. I think, of course, market size, regulatory landscape, consumer adoption and acceptance, as well as the manufacturing and operational support. All of these things are going to be important factors. It's unclear, but I certainly want to make sure that London is one of our top priorities. Do you still get a buzz when you're out in the car? Every time I'm in the car, I mean...

isn't this magical it's completely magical and it's so weird to think how many years ago you were just in your little tizzy car in cambridge the reno twizzy the prototype we uh we built in the garage of of the house where we started off this is in glisson road in cambridge and uh yeah we taught that car to drive around the block but there it was every hundred meters needed some human disengagement and the fact that i've driven for about an hour now around london with

some of the most complex scenarios you can imagine and our autonomous AI is driven through them with no human disengagement or interaction and completely autonomously that's

it's been magic and even right here we just got through a double roundabout there's or the diversion sign a road closure sign to our left two roundabouts uh literally touching each other so it's like a figure of eight we just had to drive through one and then the other i mean not quite the swindon roundabout but that's uh it's pretty special reminds me of learning to drive a bit where you just suddenly start noticing all of these things i failed my first driving test i should say that's really interesting

i uh i think i think i ran through an amber light did you yes just that would inspire you to start the business i wouldn't say i'm a terrible driver but uh i i did pass my second time but i've never actually owned a car i uh oh except my my company has a fleet so i don't know how you how you define that but i um yeah i to be honest i i get i get

I get bored by long car journeys. I would much rather use my time for something else than spend time behind the wheel. And so being able to build autonomous systems is something that would please me as a customer. How are you dealing with all the pressure on you at the moment? Because I see Wave everywhere. You're like the great British AI hope in so many ways. And people talk about you as, you know, you are the leading British, one of the leading British AI companies. And

Your life must have changed immeasurably since you founded the business, but also now with this huge investment you've got and growing globally. Yeah, how are you kind of mentally shouldering that? Well, thank you for that. I think we're still very early on in our novel, only in the first few chapters. And I found this just to be a whole adventure, right? Every year is just presented differently.

new things like this year traveling around the world working on multi-year long deals with major car manufacturers that are worth billions of dollars to bring cars to millions of vehicles I mean this is something that even just last year of course building up the technology to be able to drive safely on on these roads like every year brings a new challenge so I love that challenge I I love uh I love the learning and growth that comes with it it feels like whenever I get good at

a skill or comfortable with the process, we outgrow it. And I love living in that zone of uncomfortableness. And I also think there's been a proportionality to the growth. I mean, it hasn't just happened overnight.

This has been eight years, even longer during my PhD as well. Over my whole life I've been working on robotics. So it's been many years in the making. You know, we let our results through the talking and I think I'm really proud of being, for us being able to drive for an hour under autonomy throughout central London, like it's a really proud moment. We do show this with more confidence now because we feel like it's ready to bring to the world and, you know, feel confident about the evidence and, you know,

capabilities that we have that it can actually bring those benefits to the world it's not adding hype or you know false promises but genuinely this is something that will change the cities we live in uh does not have the limitations of the earlier iterations of autonomous driving technology but is something that can drive worldwide with the level of intelligence that can actually be safe and useful we're back we're turning back

Into your offices. Amazing. Yes, here we are back at Wave headquarters in King's Cross. Coming up to some park line bikes in the middle of the road and a lorry that's unloading. One more negotiation just if you hadn't had enough. But here we are back at the office and we'll take it back. And that beep means? That beep means we've finally disengaged autonomy after an hour of driving through central London. And here we are. We'll just manually drive it back into our garage in King's Cross.

get on with our lives. You know when you said one of your favourite things is driving around Soho in the evenings? Did you do that sometimes just for fun? Yeah, yeah. It's sometimes... Friday night spin. Friday night date night, cruising around in the autonomous vehicle. That's pretty cool. Is it the future? I think it's the future. I think it's incredibly impressive. It is the second time I've been in a wave car. As I said in the interview, it felt like the technology had come on leaps and bounds. Alex seemed to feel...

more relaxed about it as well. It's very surreal. And I know you're used to this. So forgive me for getting a bit overexcited about it. But it is very, very surreal when you sit in the back of the car and you see the steering wheel moving by itself. It's the first time the steering wheel moves. It's like a visceral experience, right? Of like...

And then seeing it navigate these incredibly complicated situations. And it was funny being in the car with Alex because it was like sitting next to a driving instructor, you know, when you're learning to drive. Oh, look. Oh, watch out for your left. Oh, there's a cyclist coming up. Make sure it comes out the other side and all of that stuff. So he's looking at it, all of these hazards. He's watching all these hazards all the time, but through an AI lens. Yeah.

So he's a combination of driving instructor and machine learning PhD. So he gets geekily fascinated, as you can hear, by the problem, the conundrum posed by a double roundabout. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was very impressive to see the car navigate it so confidently because London is not an easy place to drive in. And if you think of all of the problems that you could replace with driverless cars, people drinking, people...

people being on the phone you're so many I this is a terrible admission I had to do a speed awareness course recently do you know what that is it's to avoid getting points basically you got caught you got a ticket a speeding ticket I got a speeding ticket I didn't wasn't going very fast I was doing something like 24 in a 20 zone

To be fair to me, I don't drive very often in London. But anyway, I did get caught. And so to avoid getting points on your license, you do a speed awareness course. And the driving instructor was going through, I think it was actually a policeman, saying, what are the things that make you drive too fast? It's being angry. It's being anxious. It's being stressed. How can you mitigate those circumstances? And I'm like, well, if the car's driven by a computer. Yeah. I also sometimes drive fast when there's a good song on. And I'm like...

The computer wouldn't do that, though. No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't. Look, Danny, before we go, there's one last piece of major tech news that's happening. It's happening today. Oh. Yeah. Do tell. Well, the TimeStack podcast has a terrific producer called Callum McRae, and he's leaving. It's so sad. It's so sad. Cue the sad music. Callum, as your last act on this podcast, can you cue in some sad music for this next bit?

This is a sad day for the Times Tech podcast because you've basically launched this. And I was doing the Danny in the Valley thing on my own out here in the wilderness for years on less than a shoestring. So to have you come in and be like a total pro and actually make us sound way smarter than we are has been a total, just an amazing experience for me. And we're very sad to see you go.

No, we really are. You've been absolutely fantastic and we will miss you very much. Yeah, you've made this thing what it is, which I totally appreciate. And I'm sure I know you do too, Katie. Yeah, absolutely. Wish us luck, listeners, on our journey without Callum. Yes, yes, our Callum-less existence. It's going to be tough. Maybe we can turn him into an AI.

The Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by IBM. Katie, we talk a lot about AI on this pod. The whole world is talking about AI, Danny. And everybody says it can change the way you do business. But the thing is, Katie...

Where to start? IBM believes that any organization of any size can get started on the road to productivity with the right tech. So IBM has brought in an AI assistant as one way to get started. They're trained on your business processes, helping organizations to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks,

or to use an AI assistant to improve customer service by giving you the language and context specific to your business. IBM's AI platform, WatsonX, can help businesses of all sizes to get started on or scale their AI journey. Help you ask the right questions to get the answers you need. We all need those, Katie. You can find out more at IBM.com.

That's supposed to be simple.

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