Scale co-founder and CEO Alex Wang joined us this week at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss his company’s role in the autonomous driving industry and how it has changed in the five years since its inception. Scale is helping AV players large and small alike establish reliable ground truth through data annotation and management, and over time the standards for this have changed as the industry matures.
Good data are the “good bones” of autonomous driving systems
Even if two algorithms are more or less the same in autonomous driving, their real performance could vary dramatically depending on what input data they consume. This is where Scales value proposition for the industry comes in, and Wang explains why:
When you think of a traditional software system, what separates a good software system from a bad software system is the code, the quality of the code. For an AI system, which is all of these self-driving vehicles or autonomous vehicles, it is the data that really distinguishes an amazing algorithm from a bad algorithm. So we saw that being one of the stewards and custodians of high quality data would be incredibly important for the industry, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. We work with a lot of the great companies in the industry, from Aurora to Nuro to Toyota to General Motors, and working with all of them ensures that they have a really solid set of data to build the rest of their stacks on on top . (Timestamp: 06:24)