Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on self-driving's future, changing business model, job displacement

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
The driving force behind one of America's most influential companies.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Record high today for Uber, 100% up last year.

**David Sacks** (0:08)
Waymo and Uber have announced a partnership.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:10)
When you have a CEO that's done what Dara has done, you set the bar higher and higher.

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (0:16)
The impact we have on society is significant. We hope to keep building on that impact going forward, and I'm quite optimistic about what the future is going to bring.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:41)
All right. Dara, I wasn't sure if you were aware, but I was an early investor in Uber.

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (0:49)
I've heard you say it once or twice.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:51)
And I'm curious how my investment is doing.

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (0:54)
I don't know. Okay, based on today.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:56)
Today's looking pretty good. So, autonomy is the discussion I think everybody wants to have in the timeline. How many partners does Uber have in autonomy today?

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (1:10)
So, we have over 20 partners across both mobility and the delivery business. I'd say mobility now is in the field as we speak. Obviously, we've got a partnership with Waymo, who is I think the best of the best in Atlanta and Austin. But there are a number of other players that we are partnered with, a number of Chinese players. Autonomy in China is hitting the big time, and a lot of these companies that want to expand outside of China we're partnering with. Then in the US, even in the second half of this year, we will have a couple of partnerships hit the road in Texas, and then in Europe and the rest of the world. So, you will see we've announced a bunch of partnerships, we're doing a ton of work with these partners, you'll see these cars hit the road with safety drivers eventually, and the safety drivers will come out.
This year, and especially going into next year, we're going to have a significant number of cars on the road.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:06)
How many people in China have Level 4, no safety driver today? And what's your assessment of those companies and their safety record? It's a different market, obviously.

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (2:19)
So, there are Baidu, WeRide, Pony are all on the road today, no safety driver, we are partners with all of them, their capabilities are amazing, you can imagine driving in China and these big cities is quite a complex undertaking. They take safety just as seriously as the Western companies do, so I think their safety record is excellent. Ultimately, we think autonomous can be both superhuman in terms of safety and can save millions of lives over the course of time on the road and over a period of time, as the cost of especially the hardware stack comes down, we think that it can bring the cost of mobility down and make mobility on demand available to many, many more people than it is now. So it's going to be a very big kind of market expander for us.

**David Sacks** (3:12)
So that was the debate, Dara, that maybe kind of exploded a little bit on X between you and Elon, where you guys, I mean, very respectfully, just debating the pros and the cons. Maybe just set it up for the folks in the audience, the difference between Elon's approach and the Waymo approach, and maybe the relative pros and cons as you see it.

**Dara Khosrowshahi** (3:31)
Yeah. I mean, I think they're the ones building the cars. So I'm to some extent a very, very, very interested bystander. But the way that I put it is, Elon's approach depends on excellent software to do a bunch of the heavy lifting, in that there are some, you know, early on whenever you're building product, there may be some cheat codes that you undertake. So for example, you could call it cheat codes or, you know, good engineering. Some of the things you see in early systems is one is camera, radar, lidar. So multiple sensors, redundancy on the sensor stack to make sure that your perception algos are seeing the world as it really is. Elon is doing camera only, tougher on the software, cheaper for the hardware. Okay. Second, I would say big difference is many of the players use HD maps. And what HD maps do is, is essentially you map out an area so that it's much easier for the software to determine what are permanent aspects of a certain view. You know, the lines on the road, traffic lights, etc. Because of the HD maps, it's very, very easy for that piece of software to determine what's permanent and then what's impermanent, vehicles, people, etc. So it makes the job of the software much easier to figure out what's going on and then determine what to do. Elon's approach doesn't depend on HD maps and again, it makes the job of the software harder and then the other, I would say, significant factor is the compute. So when you look at the compute and many of the other players that compute in terms of flops and memory, etc. In the back of the car, car is pretty expensive, pretty extensive.