The accountants were, like, ‘What the hell?’ But Larry said, ‘Pay it,’ and so we did. ![]() One of his managers from that period told me, “When we got his expense report, it was equal to something like all the travel expenses of every other Google employee in his division combined. It became known as AnthonyforceLogic.” Around this time, Levandowski went to an auto dealership and bought more than a hundred cars. And so, one day, I put ads on Craigslist looking for drivers, and basically hired anyone who seemed competent, and then paid them out of my own pocket. “There was a program called WorkforceLogic, and just getting people into the system was super-complicated. “Hiring could take months,” Levandowski told me. By the time Levandowski arrived, Google’s apparatchiks were in ascent. Levandowski recently told me, “One of the reasons they wanted us was because Larry Page knew we were scrappy-we would cut through red tape.” Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, often complained that the company had become bloated, and had lost the hacker mentality that had fuelled its initial success. The company was less than a decade old, but it had almost seventeen thousand employees, including a thick layer of middle managers. Then he encountered Google’s bureaucracy. After Levandowski arrived at Google, his plan was to send out hundreds of cars, equipped with cameras, to photograph America’s roads. This technology could be adapted to map city streets, but millions of up-to-date photographs would have to be taken first. coördinates, in order to plot navigable self-driving paths over dusty hills and creek beds. Levandowski and his Grand Challenge teammates had developed a method for inexpensively stitching together thousands of landscape photographs, then combining them with G.P.S. To perfect such software, Google needed on-the-ground details: the exact locations of speed-limit signs on roads eye-level assessments of which off-ramps were easy to negotiate and which required sudden lane changes. Google was betting that, as smartphones matured, users would willingly hand over digital information about where they were and where they wanted to go-a valuable trove for a company devoted to selling targeted ads. Berkeley-was offered a job at Google worth millions of dollars.Īt the time, the company was hoping to dominate the market for navigational services with software that offered turn-by-turn instructions to urbanites seeking the quickest route to the grocery store or the gym. The National Museum of American History acquired Ghostrider for its permanent collection, and in 2007 Levandowski-then twenty-seven years old, with only a master’s degree in engineering from U.C. ![]() ![]() Although Ghostrider performed rather pitifully in its début, breaking down a few feet from the starting line, in almost every other respect it was a success: the audacity of Levandowski’s creation, coupled with his talent for charming journalists, made him the competition’s star. Most of the race’s competitors had built automated cars, but Levandowski had constructed a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider-in part, he later admitted, because he hoped that its novelty would draw attention. Google had recruited Levandowski and a handful of other roboticists four years earlier, after the group competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a government-sponsored self-driving race across deserts in California and Nevada. It was Levandowski who, with his colleagues, had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars. Often invited to company brainstorming sessions, he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the world. On the Google campus, he was easy to pick out: he was six feet seven and wore the same drab clothes every day-jeans and a gray T-shirt-which, in Silicon Valley, signalled that he preferred to conserve his cognitive energies for loftier pursuits. Levandowski was a gifted engineer who frequently spoke to newspapers and magazines, including this one, about the future of robotics. Several of the recipients gathered in one of the self-serve espresso bars that dot the company’s headquarters, and traded rumors suggesting that Anthony Levandowski-one of the company’s most talented and best-known employees-had finally gone too far. In the spring of 2011, a small group of engineers working on a secretive project at Google received an e-mail from a colleague.
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