Ford inks billion-dollar AI deal

Ford Motor Company has reaffirmed its intention to deliver a fully self-driving, autonomous vehicle to customers by 2021 by heavily investing in a small artificial intelligence technology company established less than a year ago.

Ford President and CEO Mark Fields today announced the car-maker will invest $US1 billion over five years in Argo AI, which is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has only two real assets -- its founders.

Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander have each led autonomous vehicle programs at Google and Uber respectively, and tapping their talents will increase Ford’s robustness in delivering its promise of delivering an SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicle to market by 2021.

Ford's Global Product Development and Chief Technical Officer, Raj Nair, explained how Argo AI will be integrated into Ford’s vehicle and technology development teams.

“Argo AI will be working on the brain of the autonomous vehicle," he said. "Total integration of sensors, LIDAR, RADAR and cameras will be key.”

The $US1 billion buys Ford a controlling interest in Argo AI, and Argo AI will be listed as a subsidiary of the much larger Ford Motor Company.

Fields said he believed Argo AI will create significant value to FMC, which could make the technology available to other car-makers.

“There may be opportunities to license the technology developed by Argo AI to other OEMs,” he said.

Salesky is already hiring with the intent to acquire 200 employees this year to populate three work centres in Dearborn, Pittsburgh and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Most of Argo AI employees will transfer from Ford and, with a fat chequebook, the start-up company will poach many workers from other companies also pioneering autonomous and robotic technologies.

In fact, Ford is already trailing in this area behind Toyota, which began ‘attracting’ talent to its autonomous vehicle program more than a year ago, as well as tying up joint-development programs with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford.

Ford’s big spend indicates that developing a self-driving vehicle is far harder than it first expected, and that its large and cumbersome company bureaucracy simply isn’t nimble enough to push the pace of development.

“The close and deep collaboration between Ford and Argo AI is unlike any other partnership. It will allow us to combine the speed of a start-up with Ford’s core manufacturing strengths, system integration and design,” said Nair.

The Argo AI team will focus totally on developing Level 4 autonomy without driver input.

“It is a tremendous leap in technology between driver assist and full autonomy,” admitted Nair, who said that hardware development of sensors, camera and LIDAR technology is basically completed.

Salesky says Argo AI will bring together the computer vision, the machine learning and the sometimes controversial artificial intelligence needed to operate fully autonomous, driverless vehicles.