Ford just agreed to invest a billion dollars in a self-driving car company you've probably never heard of. It's called Argo AI, and it has only existed for a couple of months. Bloomberg reports that its “founders Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander are former leaders of the self-driving car teams at Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Uber Technologies Inc.”
Google — which recently rebranded its self-driving car project Waymo — has been having this problem a lot lately:
Last year, another group of engineers left their jobs on Google's self-driving car team and started a self-driving truck company called Otto. Within months, it had been snapped up by Uber for $680 million. Later that year, the leader of Google's self-driving car project, Chris Urmson, announced he was leaving. He teamed up with a leader of Tesla's Autopilot team — the team responsible for Tesla's self-driving technology — to start a new company called Aurora. Two top engineers on Google's self-driving car team left at the same time as Urmson and created a company called Nuro.ai.
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