Autonomy Across Air, Land, and Sea

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2024

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2024 has been a milestone year for autonomous tech. Waymo’s fully autonomous driver has surpassed 20 million miles, while FAA approvals now allow commercial drones to fly without visual observers, advancing air autonomy in unprecedented ways. In this special live recording from SF Tech Week, a16z partner Erin Price-Wright moderates a panel of experts from three key domains—air, land, and sea—to explore the latest real-world deployments of autonomous systems, the impact of new chips on cost and efficiency, building full-stack solutions, managing risk, and the evolving role of regulation in driving these technologies forward. Joining the conversation is Macario Namie, CMO of Skydio, discussing the transition from consumer drones to enterprise and government use; Vijay Patnaik, Head of Product at Applied Intuition, who shares insights on developer tools and software for autonomous vehicles; and Peter Bowman-Davis, engineering fellow at a16z, diving into maritime autonomy based on his work at Saronic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There are now drones here in the Bay Area that are flown from somebody that's 20, 30, 50 miles away.
0:06.0	Mining has had some form of trucks without any drivers in them since 2007, 2008.
0:13.0	China outnumbers our shipbuilding capacity about 200 to 1.
0:17.0	Immediately, every Autel drone was just bricked in Taiwan.
0:21.6	Basic assumptions about how software is built for the kind of traditional
0:26.6	SaaS world of the 2010s just doesn't work in the autonomy space.
0:31.6	You can actually create a really, really incredible reconstruction of the world
0:34.6	just using these video generative models.
0:36.6	And this is not hype Gen AI stuff.
0:39.3	The cars we buy in US, in Europe, etc., they're not delightful consumer products,
0:45.3	like when you brought your first iPhone.
0:48.3	This has been a big year for autonomy.
0:51.3	For example, the fully autonomous Waymo driver has done over 20 million miles,
0:55.6	the equivalent of driving to the moon and back 40 times, and is now doing more than 100,000
1:01.6	rides per week. But it's not just autonomy on land. For example, the FAA granted several operators
1:07.6	the ability to fly commercial drones without visual observers earlier this year.
1:11.6	And this is only just the beginning.
1:14.6	Now, in this live recording from SF Tech Week, we brought in experts from three domains,
1:18.6	air, land, and sea, to discuss autonomous systems.
1:21.6	And we touched on the real-world deployments, the latest chips and their impact on the economics,
1:26.6	building full stack,
1:28.2	quantifying risk, and regulations role in advancing this frontier.
	...

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