Can a driverless car really cope with London traffic & is the big AI bromance over?

Summary

The Times Tech Podcast

Episode Date: July 3, 2025
Episode Title: Can a driverless car really cope with London traffic & is the big AI bromance over?
Hosts: Danny Fortson (San Francisco) & Katie Prescott (London)

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Overview

In this episode, Danny and Katie explore two monumental shifts in the tech landscape: the tension between Microsoft and OpenAI surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the advancement of driverless cars in London through the eyes of Wave’s CEO, Alex Kendall. They unpack the economics and ego of the AI talent wars, the murky world of copyright and machine learning, and Katie takes listeners on a first-hand journey through central London in a fully autonomous vehicle. The episode also dives into what these advances mean for the future of urban life, law, and big tech.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Microsoft & OpenAI: Is the “AI Bromance” Over?

(03:29 – 09:14)

• The Strategic “Bromance” Under Pressure:
  • Microsoft and OpenAI’s once-cozy relationship is being tested as OpenAI’s valuation and ambitions skyrocket. Negotiations are tense, especially around how AGI would affect Microsoft’s rights and profits.
  • Quote (Katie Prescott, 03:17):
    “...this bromance between Sam and Satya is suddenly a little colder than it once was.”
• Clash Over AGI Definition and Rights:
  • OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft stipulates that Microsoft’s privileged access to new AI models ceases if true AGI is achieved. But what counts as AGI is vague and contested.
  • Quote (Katie Prescott, 05:17):
    “Sam Altman always says it’s around the corner ... Satya Nadella, back in February, rather poo-pooed the fact that it was coming: ‘us self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking.’”
• Implications for Tech Power Structures:
  • As OpenAI’s structure shifts and new funding arrives, Microsoft wants an actual stake in the company to secure its interests beyond current access agreements.
  • OpenAI’s board currently determines if AGI has arrived, which makes Microsoft “not that happy about it.” (Katie Prescott, 07:51)

2. The AI Talent Wars: Money, Brainpower, and the Next Gold Rush

(09:32 – 13:39)

• $100 Million Pay Packages:
  • Rumors abound of Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) offering nine-figure salaries to poach top AI engineers, with several high-profile OpenAI engineers reportedly jumping ship.
  • Quote (Danny Fortson, 10:58):
    “...apparently he’s offering up to $100 million to people, which is just ludicrous.”
• Wild Valuations & Hands-Off Investing:
  • Mira Murati, former OpenAI CTO, just raised $2 billion for a new startup without product or revenue.
  • Huge investment rounds are mostly being recycled right back into the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.) via cloud contracts for AI training and serving.
  • Quote (Danny Fortson, 12:14):
    “Your Series A or your seed round is $2 billion, you know, and ... all of that money gets recycled right back into all the big hyperscalers...”
• Consequences of Salary Escalation:
  • Smaller startups simply cannot compete for AI talent. Talent is consolidating into a few well-financed giants (Google, Meta, Microsoft).

3. Copyright, AI, and the Law: Getty Images vs. Stability AI & the Anthropic Precedent

(13:58 – 18:27)

• Getty v. Stability AI (UK High Court):
  • Getty alleges its photographs were used without permission for AI training, even generating AI images with the Getty watermark.
  • The remaining issue: if AI models trained abroad are imported into the UK, does that constitute copyright infringement?
  • Quote (Danny Fortson, 15:28):
    “You’re…bringing in pirated materials. Like selling stolen goods in another country.”
• US Ruling: Anthropic & Fair Use:
  • The US judge mostly sided with Anthropic, ruling that digitizing and scanning legitimately purchased physical books (even millions of them) for AI training qualifies as fair use; using pirated books remains under scrutiny.
  • Quote (Danny Fortson, 17:29):
    “That buying of a book and then doing with it what you will is why in this, in this ruling, he’s like — basically, this is fair use. You’re fine.”
• Broader Implications:
  • Potential existential damages for companies found liable for copyright infringement.
  • Ongoing legal ambiguity and the race to “fiddle” through a solution.

4. Special Feature: Katie’s Driverless London Adventure with Wave

(20:24 – 44:57)

Introducing Wave

(21:49 – 23:08)

• Founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and a fellow Cambridge PhD student.
• Different approach: Instead of hard-coding routes, Wave’s AI learns to drive via behavioral feedback and large-scale learning.
• SoftBank, Nvidia, Microsoft among major investors; now an international operation.

In-Car Interview: Road-Test in the Wild Streets of London

(24:19 – 44:19)

• “Sitting in the back, there was a safety driver up front... but he didn’t have to touch the car once.” (Katie Prescott, 24:23)
• Why London?
  • Deliberately chosen for its complexity (“medieval origins… merging, roundabouts, and inclement weather”) to build a system robust enough for any city (Alex Kendall, 26:26).
• AI That Reads Body Language:
  • Wave’s AI models not only recognize jaywalkers but also predict intent from body posture and movement.
  • Quote (Alex Kendall, 30:16):
    “One of the things we got very good at: predicting from the pedestrian’s body language... Does their body language look like they’re going to cross or not?”
• Global Advancement:
  • In the last year, Wave expanded to drive proficiently on highways, in Germany, Japan, and 70+ cities (31:01).
  • The technology has advanced dramatically, learning complex interaction — like hand signals from police or ambiguous merges — with general AI rather than specific rules (32:55).
• Personalizing Car “Personality”:
  • Level of assertiveness can be prompted, within safety boundaries.
  • Quote (Alex Kendall, 34:09):
    “You can prompt the AI and ask it to drive in the style you want… [but] within what’s safe.”
• Legislative Milestones:
  • The UK’s Automated Vehicles Act positions the country for driverless trials from 2027.
  • Regulatory frameworks still trail the US and Asia in some ways; market selection for rollout is a complex mix of “regulatory landscape, consumer adoption, manufacturing support…” (39:28).

The Human Element & The Promise of Change

• Alex Kendall describes the thrill and pride of watching Wave’s AI progress from Cambridge garages to London’s labyrinth.
• Quote (Alex Kendall, 42:25):
  “We’re still very early on in our novel, only in the first few chapters, and I found this just to be a whole adventure.”
• Katie notes the surreal feeling of riding as the steering wheel moves by itself:
  • “It’s very, very surreal … when you sit in the back of the car and see the steering wheel moving by itself.” (Katie Prescott, 45:24)
• Reflections on how autonomous vehicles might reshape car ownership, public spaces, and personal mobility, with a vision of more efficient, safer, and greener cities.

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Notable Quotes

• Sam vs. Satya on AGI:
  “Us self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking.”
  — Satya Nadella, recalled by Katie Prescott (06:46)
• On AI Talent Escalation:
  “If I’m offering $100 million to individuals, but the prize is trillions — drop in the bucket, of course.”
  — Danny Fortson (11:05)
• On Copyright & Fair Use in AI Training:
  “Buying of a book and then doing…what you will is…fair use. You’re fine.”
  — Danny Fortson, summarizing Anthropic ruling (17:29)
• On AI Reading People:
  “The AI is able to actually predict…and understand how the world will evolve with very complex scenarios.”
  — Alex Kendall (30:20)
• Personal Reflection:
  “I get bored by long car journeys — I’d much rather use my time for something else…so being able to build autonomous systems is something that would please me as a customer.”
  — Alex Kendall (41:30)
• On the Surreality of Driverless Cars:
  “It is very, very surreal … when you sit in the back of the car and see the steering wheel moving by itself.”
  — Katie Prescott (45:24)

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Key Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | Timestamp | |---------|-------|-----------| | Opening banter, episode themes | - | 01:41–03:29 | | The Microsoft/OpenAI “bromance” and AGI clause | - | 03:29–09:14 | | AI talent wars, $100M salaries | - | 09:32–13:39 | | Copyright showdowns: Getty v. Stability AI, Anthropic US win | - | 13:58–18:27 | | Katie’s driverless car adventure: intro and company background | - | 20:24–24:19 | | In-car conversation: tech, training, scaling, urban challenges | - | 25:00–41:30 | | Reflection on the magic, implications, and future for London | - | 44:57–46:36 |

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Tone & Style

The podcast combines humor and self-deprecating wit (“Well, just like a couple loser tech reporters...,” Danny Fortson, 01:49), playful banter about tech swag, and moments of awe at the acceleration of innovation. The interviews and discussions carry a friendly, geekily enthusiastic, and lightly skeptical tone — always questioning, but also clearly hyped by the scale of transformation.

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Summary Takeaway

The episode captures a moment when foundational technologies — machine intelligence and driverless cars — are both accelerating and running into real-world frictions: power struggles, legal voids, and bumpy streets (literal and political). Listeners are left with the sense that AI’s next leaps will be decided as much by definitions, legal frameworks, and talent migration as by lines of code or rounds of venture capital. And for those skeptical that a driverless car can handle London’s chaos? Katie’s test drive with Wave suggests the future is nearer — and weirder — than you think.

Transcript

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[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Katie Prescott]

So, Danny, we should say for listeners who can't see us, we've both turned up to the recording of this podcast today looking quite sad.

[Danny Fortson]

Well, just like a couple loser tech reporters.

[Katie Prescott]

Show me your T shirt. Sit up a little bit. You've got Google Cloud blazoned across your chest.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, and you know what's cool? It's not just any texwag. This is like extra soft cotton.

[Katie Prescott]

Okay?

[Danny Fortson]

Don't be jealous, okay?

[Katie Prescott]

I would be jealous, but I can go one better because I've got. Can you see this video GTC Paris with a picture of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine and in a sort of Monet style with GTC and large letters at the bottom.

[Danny Fortson]

So very sad. It's like a con. It's like a. It's like a concert shirt, you know, like, oh man, I saw Jensen on tour. I Saw him in Paris. No, I saw him in San Jose.

[Katie Prescott]

I did look on ebay and these GTC T shirts got to about 80 quid.

[Danny Fortson]

You're not serious?

[Katie Prescott]

I'm not obviously not going to sell it because it's too precious.

[Danny Fortson]

I mean, obviously.

[Katie Prescott]

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech

[Danny Fortson]

Podcast with me, Katie Prescott and me, Danny Fortson. Coming up today we talk about AI talent wars and the odd, you know, hundred million dollar salaries being thrown around. What's 100 million between friends? Plus Anthropic's big win kind of over use of books and copyrighted materials and training their AI models.

[Katie Prescott]

And I go on a drive, but without a driver, but with the boss of a driverless car company, Wave in London to find out if this is the end of driving as we know it in the uk.

[Danny Fortson]

But first, Katie, a story you wrote about this very week is the bromance, this famous bromance between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. Dead over kaput, or as you put it more kindly, under pressure.

[Katie Prescott]

I think that might have been subbed by somebody else. But anyway, yeah, this is an absolutely amazing story if you think of the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, strategic partnership, as they called it when it started back in 2019 and Microsoft put a billion dollars into OpenAI, which, you know, turned out to be quite a good bet, you might say at the time, they didn't get a stake in the company partly because of this very strange structure that OpenAI had as a not for profit, but they did get a share of the profits, albeit a capped one. And now OpenAI is fiddling around with its structure and has taken on a lot more funding and it's got people like SoftBank involved and their valuation is 300 billion. They need to renegotiate their relationship with Microsoft. And so, as you say, this bromance between Sam and Satya is suddenly a little colder than it once was.

[Danny Fortson]

And so, but what is that? How does that manifest itself? Is it like a whisper campaign? Is this like, you know, like, oh, these things are leaking out and there's some interesting, well sourced stories about how sat.

[Katie Prescott]

That's exactly it. This is no Elon Musk fight with Donald Trump. This is absolutely leaks behind the scenes about what's going on in these negotiations. But I think the most fascinating thing about it is it all bizarrely hinges on AGI, right?

[Danny Fortson]

The definition of it's the definition of it.

[Katie Prescott]

But also it is a sort of nebulous concept, which I find really interesting because as we know, Sam Altman says that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. And it has a definition for it, which is a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Okay. Following, yep, it had this fascinating clause in its contract with Microsoft which basically said once it hit this point and once it got to AGI, Microsoft would no longer have rights to OpenAI's stuff

[Danny Fortson]

or anything once it hit that point beyond, like, in other words, because from memory, Microsoft basically is part of their investment. Which is why Satya Nadella has such leverage is that like they have free reign to do whatever they want with OpenAI's code, with their agents, with whatever.

[Katie Prescott]

Exactly.

[Danny Fortson]

Up until they hit AGI. But then what happens once. What happens when we hit this magical.

[Katie Prescott]

So the contract says it can stop sharing new models with Microsoft. And obviously that's really, really problematic because people will want the new models because they will be AGI, they'll be the most advanced. And Microsoft's value from OpenAI, as you say, is in having access to all these models. It didn't have a stake in the business, but it did have access to the models. And so now they're renegotiating that relationship. And Microsoft wants a stake in OpenAI in the new world of OpenAI.

[Danny Fortson]

Right, right, right.

[Katie Prescott]

And it wants to this AGI nonsense. And it's really interesting when you look at what Sam and Satya have been saying about it. Sam Altman always says it's around the corner, we're on the cusp of it. Whereas Satya Nadella, back in February, rather poo pooed the fact that it was coming. He said, us self claiming some AGI milestone. That's just nonsensical benchmark hacking.

[Danny Fortson]

I love it. Well, because of course, they're both talking their book. You know, he's like, AGI, that's never gonna happen.

[Katie Prescott]

What's that?

[Danny Fortson]

I get access forever and ever and ever. But it is interesting, like when Elon Musk sued OpenAI over their conversion from a nonprofit to a for profit, and him kind of going to war with Sam Altman in his lawsuit, he said, look, they've already reached AGI. And so he was trying to say that point has already arrived. If you look at the capabilities of these models, which is a stretch, I mean, they're helpful, but they're definitely, definitely not like the super intelligence that's better at humans than everything. That is not true.

[Katie Prescott]

The important thing though, is who gets to decide. And in the clause at the Moment, it's the OpenAI board, so you can see why Microsoft isn't that happy about it.

[Danny Fortson]

It's interesting and I guess ultimately I think you're going to have to come down to some type of benchmarking, which is why there's, you know, there's this thing we mentioned before called humanity's last examination, where this organization has brought together like the top experts in all these different fields, come up with all these really complex questions and said when AI can basically ace this test, that is when they're calling it humanity's last exam. Because then you're like, oh, okay, well, we've been surpassed by the machines. And it's this test that is kind of constantly being kind of built up and evolved as they get more experts from around the world to come up with their biggest, most naughty questions in their given field. But I think that maybe it'll be something like that that ultimately defines this.

[Katie Prescott]

I suspect in the, in the new contract they'll try and just get rid of it altogether. It's, yeah, as you say, so hard to define and unless it applies to everybody else, all the other partners. Yeah, it, it doesn't maybe make sense in this, in this new AI world, but it does feel like OpenAI is soaring above its master, which is quite funny.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. And it is, it's a, feels like almost like love.

[Katie Prescott]

Go on.

[Danny Fortson]

That's how beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like somebody who's like, you know, if I'm the creator of this thing, I'm like, yes, this thing's amazing. It's like it can do everything. And you know, somebody else might be like, meh, not for me.

[Alex Kendall]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

You know.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah. And I get the impression Microsoft has tried to fall in love with other companies, but no one's quite special.

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly, exactly. Speaking of dating around and trying to land new partners in this crazy AI world, our mate Mark Zuckerberg, he's been throwing his money around. Obviously he spent $14 billion on scale AI, which is this company that trains, helps train AI models and label data and all this stuff. But there's been the story doing the rounds that he's been offering nine figure pay packages to AI engineers.

[Katie Prescott]

Have you got the call?

[Danny Fortson]

Weirdly, no. I mean, no. I did send him, just cold emailed him my Meatball Mania video game that

[Katie Prescott]

I vibe coded with your bank details at the bottom.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, I'm just like, you don't even have to respond. Just like direct deposit, my dude. Weirdly, that hasn't happened yet. I'm checking like, I'm checking my bank account like every 15 minutes.

[Katie Prescott]

Because apparently he's trying to work out on his list, like how people like being approached. You know, does Danny Fortson prefer a WhatsApp or an email?

[Danny Fortson]

I just prefer the.

[Katie Prescott]

Do you? And then you'll turn up at 9 o' clock on Monday?

[Danny Fortson]

No, I'm in demand. Have you seen my video game? I'm like, I just, I sit here, I work my magic and you pay me all the money.

[Katie Prescott]

Sam on one phone, Sassya on the other.

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. But anyway, so, yeah, so I haven't got the call from Mark, but he has managed to poach apparently at least four senior OpenAI engineers with these offers of. Yeah, apparently he's offering up to $100 million to people, which is just ludicrous. Clearly the. All of these guys think this is the biggest thing since sliced bread. Because if you're like, well, if I'm offering $100 million to individuals, but the prize is trillions drop in the bucket, of course. And it's like there's this whole race mentality, who's going to get there first, who's going to build the best model, who's going to kind of steal a march and everybody else AI clearly is in the lead, but it's really quite extraordinary and it makes the dot com boom, which when I started my career out here, look, I mean the numbers and just what's happening here are so insane.

[Katie Prescott]

If you had a time machine, do you think it would be sensible to go back to your university days and maybe do a PhD in machine learning, swerving the humanities?

[Danny Fortson]

Of course it would.

[Katie Prescott]

You can tell your future self, well,

[Danny Fortson]

we've chosen the wrong career, but I kind of knew that at the time. But I'm like, I'm just. My mind does not. Is not quantitative like that. But even like for example, like Mira Muradi, who was another OpenAI founder who left, she just raised $2 billion for her startup. $2 billion. No product, no revenue. It's like a PowerPoint deck. And her and some smart people from OpenAI, that's like your starter, that's like your Series A or your seed round is $2 billion, you know, and all. Most of that money, I'm sure is just going to get recycled right back into all the big hyperscalers. Which is why like Microsoft and Amazon and Google are doing so well. Because everybody's just like taking all the money they raise and then paying for space in their data centers to train and run all of these models. So it's a little bit like of a washing machine. You know, and any money is left is just spent on the engineers, on the. The people building these systems.

[Katie Prescott]

I guess the slight danger as well is that you do end up consolidating the talent in the hands of the few again. I was speaking to one of the AI unicorns in London about this and they laughed when I said, were they thinking of paying those sorts of salaries? Of course they did, because nobody else can. But it just means that maybe, unlike in the past, where you take a stake in the company and then you'd hope it would grow and you'd make your future wealth that way, you can just go straight to Meta now.

[Danny Fortson]

I'm just still waiting for my email from Mark. Hold on, let me just check. Maybe it's in your spam while you tee up the next news item. I'm just gonna see if Mark has texted me.

[Katie Prescott]

Check your Facebook messenger as well.

[Danny Fortson]

Oh, yeah. Cause I know he forces it. No, still nothing from my guy. It's weird.

[Katie Prescott]

He's busy. Don't worry. Just keep holding onto your phone. So I really, really want to talk about copyright as our last story, and that's partly because there's been this huge case going on here in the High Court between Getty Images and Stability AI, which finished on Monday.

[Danny Fortson]

And has there been any news out of that? Because I know that was like, the big one, at least over on that side of the pond.

[Katie Prescott]

Exactly. It is. It is really the big one and the only one, as the government here grapples with what to do about this copyright issue. So Getty Images alleged that Stability AI was using their material in their machine, in early versions, their machine, and that you could thus generate images with the Getty watermark on, including pornographic and inappropriate images, which they said damaged the brand. So they dropped a number of bits of the case as it went along, and it ended up being about, really their trademark by the end, the Getty trademark, and what the damage that was being done to the brand. But it also really interestingly, and this is a bit geeky, but bear with me, they were initially looking at whether the models had been trained in the UK and trained abroad. They dropped the one that accused stability of training in the uk, but they kept the abroad one, with the issue being that if the judge finds spaghetti, even if businesses have trained AI, businesses have trained their models abroad and then brought it into the uk, it could still breach somebody's copyright here because you're

[Danny Fortson]

bringing in pirated materials. You're like, I used to live in Spain, and you'd be like walking through the plaza, and there'd be all these guys selling, like, pirated CDs on a blanket, and then they could pick it up in a moment and run if the police came. But it was like, you're selling stolen goods in another country, basically.

[Katie Prescott]

That's exactly right. And it's so interesting you use that example because that's exactly what stability have argued, that it's for physical goods and not for things like AI. So the verdict's expected in a few months, and that will give everyone a lot of clarity into the direction of travel over copyright. But there'd been two rulings at the same time in the U.S. yeah, the

[Danny Fortson]

big one was Anthropic, and it was mostly a victory for them in that, you know, they were similarly being sued by authors who were saying, basically, you stole our stuff without our asking, and you've used it to train your models, and that is a copyright violation. And the judge said basically, no, broadly speaking, no, with some nuance. So first of all, Anthropic was like, they used 7 million pirated books. And that seems like, not up for debate. That is a fact that has come out through the course of all these hearings that still needs to be adjudicated and will be. What they then did is last year they hired somebody from Google, the person who did their big books project, which was also very controversial. You know, Google was wanting to put every book on the Internet, digitize it, put it on the Internet. So what they did under this guy's guidance, apparently, is buy millions of physical books, extract the pages physically from the book, scan them, turning each page into a digital document, and then using that to train their models. And then afterwards, they shredded all the books.

[Katie Prescott]

Horrible thing to do.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. But that buying of a book and then doing with. With it what you will is why in this. In this ruling, he's like, basically, this is fair use. You're fine. As long as you're using this as inspiration. As long as you purchasing these copyrighted materials and then doing with it what you will, you're good. The pirated books case, which I think will. That will continue. But, like, if you just buy every book on the planet and scan it, that apparently is okay, according to this ruling.

[Katie Prescott]

Wow. The. I was speaking to a lawyer about this while I was covering the Getty case, and they said the damages that Anthropic faces over these pirated books could be existential. He said, could be significant, even existential, which is really interesting. But it is nuanced, isn't it? And it feels like everybody's trying to fiddle their way through it at the moment and no one's coming up with a satisfactory answer.

[Danny Fortson]

Right, let's take a little break then after the break, Katie, you get driven on a driverless drive around London like

[Katie Prescott]

Toad of Toad Hall.

[Alex Kendall]

Vroom, vroom.

[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Katie Prescott]

Danny, I've got a brilliant idea for your next date night when you come to London.

[Danny Fortson]

All right, hit me.

[Katie Prescott]

So you could get in a driverless car and go around the streets of Soho on a Friday evening while the drunken patrons of the local theatres and pubs spill out onto chaotic single lane roads.

[Danny Fortson]

That sounds incredibly romantic. Hopefully I'll see a couple people barfing in the sight, you know, in the gutters.

[Katie Prescott]

You're really lucky. But it's what today's guest likes to do. Apparently he's the boss and co founder of wave, the UK's answer to Waymo. And you can see if you founded a driverless car company, seeing your vehicles in action would be quite satisfying. But at the moment. Unless you go on a date with Alex Kendall, the boss. I think this is going to be tricky to organize for you because we don't yet have driverless cars in London.

[Danny Fortson]

I mean, it was already struggling. Romantic was doing a lot of work there, but now this sounds far less romantic. I don't think Mrs. F is going to go for that. Me, you, and a random tech CEO, babe, let's do it.

[Katie Prescott]

Wearing my Google Cloud T shirt. I mean. Okay, romance aside, one of the perks of our job is obviously sometimes we get access to things that aren't yet open to the public. And a few weeks ago, I got to drive around London in one of Waves driverless cars while talking to Alex, and it was pretty cool.

[Danny Fortson]

Do you want to tell me a little bit about Wave with a why? Because I think it's fair to say people know less about them than Waymo with a Y. Yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

So Wave was founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall and another PhD student in Cambridge. And they had this IDE year that rather than train a car to drive along certain roads and follow a path that it would learn through artificial intelligence by being fed information. And that's exactly what they did in Cambridge. So they had a little car, a Renault Twizzy that looks a little bit like a golf buggy, and they worked on automating it and so that it could drive itself around the block. Now, fast forward to last year, and SoftBank came in with a billion dollars, along with Nvidia and Microsoft, and Microsoft had been a previous investor in the company. And Wave is now one of the UK's top AI businesses, and it's recognized around the world. So they've now got offices in San Francisco, out in Japan. These are the links to SoftBank in Stuttgart, and it's expanding at a rate of knots, largely due to this enormous bazooka investment from Matisson.

[Danny Fortson]

Fascinating. Well, I want to hear about. I want to hear about your ride. And then, because, you know, we're living a little bit further in the future here because we have Waymo out here, which is everywhere.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, no, it really is so unusual here. It was quite bamboozling. As you're here, I'm interested to hear what the interview sounds like, because I was so overexcited, I forgot most of my questions. So this was the second time I've been in a Wave, and I was lucky enough to go in one when they got that mega funding round last year. And just to set the scene before we play it, Waves based in a large office on what is. It's kind of a scruffy road north of King's Cross and it almost looks like it should be a garage or a petrol station. And we got into one of the cars which are all sitting out on the forecourt. Alex and I sat in the back and there was a driver in the front. Right. Because at the moment you have to have a safety driver in a car in the uk and this is not an Elon Musk man with hands on his knees in the passenger seat, this is sitting behind the wheel. But they have their hands kind of cupped under the wheel and not touching it. So if something happens they can step in.

[Danny Fortson]

Hands on knees or hands cupped?

[Katie Prescott]

Hands cupped. I'd love to make the laws around this. Great. So we were in the back, there was a chap in the front, a safety driver, but he didn't have to touch the car once, I should say. And we went down into central London. So if you think King's Cross is the north, we cut straight through into the centre, past the British Museum and those little higgledy piggledy streets around there, which were full of kids because it was half term. And Great Ormond Street Hospital, which was unloading ambulances and all sorts of things. So it was a. It was a proper London experience, I have to say.

[Danny Fortson]

Well, let's hear it.

[Katie Prescott]

One of the things I found really scary about coming out in the car last time. Scary is the wrong word, but kind of challenging when you're getting your head around being in a driverless car, is turning onto the York Road. It's not an easy road to drive on as a driver, let alone with the safety driver.

[Alex Kendall]

Well, let's see, it's a busy road to turn on here.

[Katie Prescott]

It has always made me wonder, why did you choose to be in King's Cross?

[Alex Kendall]

Well, we were starting the company in Cambridge and as we were growing and looking for a space, ironically, we wanted to find a space that was really important to us, to co locate the car and our team so that everyone can go and test and get in the car whenever they want and see what the autonomy is like. And actually Kings Cross, we found the best spot in central London, near where we all lived, with a warehouse that could house our team and our fleet, because it.

[Katie Prescott]

Sorry, should we talk about the technology? Because you've just pressed the button to make the car autonomous, is that what's just happened?

[Alex Kendall]

That's right. We're sitting in here in one of our wave autonomous vehicles in central London. Our safety operator just turned the system on We've got a safety operator behind the wheel monitoring the system, but the AI is now driving the car. Speed steering indicators, the brakes, everything about the car is now being driven by the AI.

[Katie Prescott]

But my question about why King's Cross was I guess also you would think that a car company might want to be somewhere more in the countryside with more open roads, with easier roads to drive on. Was the challenge part of the reason for being here?

[Alex Kendall]

Since the beginning of Wave, we've tried to try to take on the hardest problems first in building this, because the autonomous driving industry many years ago started in places like Phoenix, Arizona, which is a city in the US where there's a grid like array of streets, the sun always shines. I think they have like one or two rainy days a year and one of the easiest places to learn to drive. Whereas you come to central London and it's medieval origins of cities with lots of merging and roundabouts and of course the weather that adds complexity here. So coming here forced us to build something that would scale, forced us to build a system that was intelligent to not just drive with protected red and green arrows on every intersection, but actually learn how to navigate and predict how others will move. Interesting stat there are. Compared to San Francisco where there are lots of self driving cars, London has about seven times more jaywalk.

[Katie Prescott]

Is that right? The hazards are everywhere, not to mention the lime bikes. Right? I mean that must be an excellent.

[Alex Kendall]

Well, just now we've already just driven through a pedestrian crossing with someone darting out from behind a vehicle, there's a lime bike coming around beside us and now we're just stopping here at a, at a red light.

[Katie Prescott]

So what's happening with the technology? What is the car, how is this working? How do you sum it up for people?

[Alex Kendall]

Yeah, it's, it's a core belief that we've had that autonomous driving is really an AI problem. It's a problem of how do we build a system that, that we can trust to drive through scenarios that may never have seen before. Because of course we can collect all the training data that we need in the world to understand the diversity of where we drive. But at the end of the day you're always going to see things where, how people and cars are on the road or the weather. It's always going to be different even if you drive down the same road twice. And so the key thing here is how do we have a system that's intelligent enough to deal with things it may never have seen before. And for us, building an AI system was how to do this. So since the beginning of the company, we've been building a technology that learns to drive, that learns the behaviors you might expect. Like here we're just slowing down for a speed bump. We haven't told the car if there's a speed bump, you should slow down. Instead. It's learned from behavior and feedback that that's a policy it should learn. It's learned how to go through traffic lights and that means that it can drive through any traffic light it sees, rather than specifically just ones that have been mapped or, or pre coded how it should navigate through them.

[Katie Prescott]

I loved your stat about the number of jaywalkers compared to driverless cars because every time I speak to my podcast co host in San Francisco, he talks about going in a driverless car, I'm like, you might as well be on a different planet because obviously we just don't have them here in that way yet or that experience. And I think the UK government has now said it's going to be 2027, so they'll be on the road.

[Alex Kendall]

Last year we were able to help the government pass the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which puts in place the legislation to legalize autonomous driving here in the uk. Originally it was meant to be enacted. The actual regulation implemented by 2026. It's been pushed back a year to 2027. And we now expect this to all come in place by the end of, end of 2027.

[Katie Prescott]

Because it's the second time I've done this. I definitely felt more comfortable this time. And I wanted to ask as well, do you feel like the, the tack has advanced in the last year?

[Alex Kendall]

Oh, massively, Katie. I mean, a year ago we were just driving in central London. In fact, probably couldn't have done some of the complexity we see on the road today. But in the last year we have learned to now drive on highways at high speeds. We now drive across the world in Germany, in Europe, in Japan and Stuttgart even. That was quite interesting. Do you see the pedestrian that was next to the crossing? A lot of self driving cars will stop if there's a pedestrian anywhere near the crossing. But one of the things we got very good at is predicting from the pedestrian's body language. You know, how are they shaping? Does their body language look like they're going to cross or not?

[Danny Fortson]

Wow.

[Alex Kendall]

And to be able to predict so

[Katie Prescott]

the sensors are looking at the people and how they're reacting.

[Alex Kendall]

We've developed a world model. The AI is able to actually predict and understand how the world will evolve with very complex scenarios. So in that instance, the pedestrian's body language was not facing the crossing, they were just walking past. So we didn't stop, we just drove through as you would. Whereas if they were shaping to cross the crossing, of course we'd yield for them. And learning that kind of level of intelligence is really awesome. But over the last year we've grown orders of magnitude and performance and then spread out to now drive all around the world, from the autobahns in Germany to downtown Tokyo for example. Actually in the last 90 days we've now driven in over 70 different cities, which is a pretty remarkable statistic because

[Katie Prescott]

it's been a year since I saw you last. And that was on the occasion of you getting the billion dollar investment led by SoftBank. Is that what's precipitated so much of the technological change? We can talk about the company's growth in a minute.

[Alex Kendall]

Yeah, I mean that investment of course was a huge inflection point for us, gave us the ability to build out everything required to turn this technology prototype into a robust product that can be trusted across the automotive industry. So there was huge build out in turning this into a reliable product that can actually operate in consumer and commercial vehicles. And then of course a lot of the technology investments that we have been pioneering for the last eight years I think have just keep landing wins.

[Katie Prescott]

You talked about pedestrians behavior. Are there other things that have been really challenging to train the vehicle to do that you've managed to predominantly the

[Alex Kendall]

hard thing to do in this is multi agent interaction is dealing and predicting how others are going to move. And actually driving requires a lot of negotiation. I mean consider if you're in a crowd of people and you need to nudge your way through, or if you're in a merge situation, if you don't negotiate and if you sit back and wait for space, you might be stuck there for maybe an hour. Although I was in Tokyo two months ago when we launched our cars there for the first time. What was cool to see was a Japanese police officer jumped out in front of us and actually put his hand up and said stop, you know, wait. And wanted to let an emergency vehicle out from the side of the road. Our car I, we hadn't had any specific training data from Japan yet, but from its general intelligence was able to understand to stop for that police officer. And then after they let the car out then they waved us through and actually recognized that signal and then drove forward. And so the sheer general purpose intelligence that we're seeing emerging in this AI is quite remarkable. And is very quickly proving itself to be able to drive all around the world.

[Katie Prescott]

Talk to me then about how the investment has changed the business in the last year. So you've expanded now, office in San Francisco, in Germany, in Japan as well.

[Alex Kendall]

That's right. So there has been a year of global Geo expansion. Of course, the investment's given our partners the trust to work with us, because launching a product in automotive requires years of development and then years of expansion. And we have that business plan fully funded and the Runway to actually be trusted in the automotive space and, of course, continue to grow our team. And it's no secret there's an AI talent war going on at the moment. And the expertise that. That we've been able to bring on board and that I'm so thrilled to work with at Wave has been awesome. One of my favorite things to do is go autonomous driving, say, on a Friday night through Soho, where you have all of the people coming out of the theater, very, very busy. You can see some amazing scenarios there. And just the sheer intelligence of our system to safely navigate through those kind of scenarios. When, of course, you have all the drunken people spilling out of bars and shows that you might expect.

[Katie Prescott]

I can sit and people just walk out into the road.

[Alex Kendall]

Oh, there we go.

[Katie Prescott]

Can't she smooth? Confident. Yeah, confident driving. Does the car have personality?

[Alex Kendall]

Something you can personalize? You can prompt the AI and ask it to drive in the style that you might want.

[Katie Prescott]

Aggressive London. Shouty.

[Alex Kendall]

Your words, not mine. But if you want to drive that way, of course our AI understands the envelope of what's safe and what the boundaries are.

[Katie Prescott]

Oh, someone spotted it. There's a guy outside who's grinning at the car.

[Alex Kendall]

Yeah. These things are still a bit novel in London, but I hope really soon everyone gets to experience.

[Katie Prescott]

So 2027, this is the plan that in the UK we'll see autonomous vehicles on the road.

[Alex Kendall]

So in 2020, to be specific, in 2027, it is the government's plan to have legal frameworks implemented so that you can get approval to run robo taxis or driverless vehicles. We have not yet publicly shared our date that we'll be launching such a capability, but we're working on it as quickly as we can and we're really excited to do so with that regulatory approval.

[Katie Prescott]

And have you got a sense? And we don't have to talk specifically about Wave, but when you think driverless cars in London might become so common that you won't see that chap stopping and going, hey, oh, what's that? Man got his hands on the wheel

[Alex Kendall]

as soon as they're legal. I mean, as I said, we'll be working on this as quickly as we can. We've got some great partners from the automotive companies that we work with, of course, Uber, who's a really great partner of ours. And we're working together on as quickly as we can bringing this technology to the world and doing it in a way that's safe and scalable, which may take it beyond some of the limited deployments we've seen so far in cities like Shanghai and San Francisco, just to be clear.

[Katie Prescott]

So wave works, your technology is then embedded in partner cars. Sorry, with car makers. Essentially you've just signed a deal with Nissan, for example.

[Alex Kendall]

That's right. So we're at building the embodied AI platform across different manufacturers and operators of different robots. So whether this is a car company or other form of mobility service or manufacturer, we've built a foundation model that's really good at understanding how to navigate through complex scenes, how to drive safely, how to understand the physical world. That's embodied AI. AI in the physical world. And this foundation model is general purpose. So we can optimize and deploy it in a driver assistance application in a consumer vehicle, or we can deploy it in a robotaxi or in another form of robotics. And this is this platform that we want to partner with the world's most innovative fleets and automakers to allow them to create autonomous products. So first that'll be with driver assistance products, then robo taxi and autonomous mobility, and then of course many other autonomous machines that can make our lives more safe and sustainable.

[Katie Prescott]

What are your thoughts on where we'll be with car ownership? In some. My gosh, bike just crossed over. He's not wearing a helmet. But in terms of safely responded. And it did, yeah, yielded for them because in London it feels to me like car ownership's declining. Do you see your technology and cars that are going to be used by organizations like Uber, or do you think people will continue to own cars?

[Alex Kendall]

I think that's a really interesting question. The first thing is I think multimodal transportation and different options is going to be really important to people. So I think it's interesting to argue about the distribution across different modes, but I think there's going to be a non zero amount of every mode and that's important. Trains, bikes, walking, micro mobility, public transport, shared transport, personally owned transport. I think we need an arrange to meet the diversity of people's needs. So that's the first thing I think is really really key here. I cycle to work every day and I think, I hope cycling's still a key part of the way we get around. But I do think that autonomy provides a number of opportunities. Think about when you improve road safety, what that lets you do for transportation. Improve accessibility, reduce the cost, of course, by making vehicles more highly utilized today, cars at idle on average 97% of the time. And so being able to utilize these vehicles better, to be able to run them more efficiently, I mean, that opens up many more applications. Whether this is lower volume, more frequent public transport, or maybe even personalized public transport on the route, I think we will see an increase in ride hailing and shared car ownership. I think that's natural as imagine if your Uber costs a quarter of the cost that it costs today, right? I mean, I think that would be if a, a 30 pound or $30 uber was all of a sudden 10 or 15 pounds or dollars, that really does swing in favor. I think the availability of that transport, that can be made more efficient. And then even how much space we waste with car parking in London, 10 times the size of Hyde park is taken up by car parks. And when you have cars that aren't sitting idle but are constantly utilized, you can turn those car parks into green parks and, and make that space more efficient. So I think there's a ton of changes we are going to see. The way we move around cities, not to mention by reducing accidents, we can of course reduce congestion and make actually the journey faster and more effective.

[Katie Prescott]

Do you think that it's likely that autonomous cars, powered by waves technology are going to be on the roads in other cities before they are in London? I mean, is it easier for you to deploy them in San Francisco where they're already.

[Alex Kendall]

We haven't committed to which city will be first yet, but I can comment in the general sense. I mean, London, we've got maybe home turf advantage here, so there's an attraction on that point. But we are seeing that the regulatory landscape in the US is more advanced. We are also seeing automotive manufacturers in general in Asia and Japan and China and the United States are certainly further ahead than those in Europe. So I think there's going to be some interesting factors as to how this technology goes out. I think, of course, market size, regulatory landscape, consumer adoption and acceptance, as well as the manufacturing and operational support, all of these things are going to be important factors. It's unclear, but I certainly want to make sure that London is one of our top priorities.

[Katie Prescott]

Do you still get a buzz when you're out in the car.

[Alex Kendall]

Oh, every time I'm in the car. I mean, isn't this magical?

[Katie Prescott]

It's completely magical. And it's so weird to think how many years ago you were just in your little tizzy car in Cambridge.

[Alex Kendall]

The Reno Twizy Twizzy we built in the garage of the house where we started off. This is in Glisson Road in Cambridge. And yeah, we taught that car to drive around the block, but there it was every hundred meters needed some human disengagement. And the fact that we've driven for about an hour now around London with some of the most complex scenarios you can imagine. And our autonomous AI has driven through them with no human disengagement or interaction. And completely autonomously, that's.

[Katie Prescott]

That's.

[Alex Kendall]

It's been magic. And even right here, we. We just go through a double roundabout. There's.

[Katie Prescott]

With a diversion sign, a road closure

[Alex Kendall]

sign to our left, two roundabouts literally touching each other. So it's like a figure of eight. We just had to drive through one and then the other. I mean, not quite the Swindon roundabout, but that's. That's pretty special.

[Katie Prescott]

Reminds me of learning to drive a bit where you just suddenly start noticing all of these things.

[Alex Kendall]

I failed my first driving test, I

[Katie Prescott]

should say, in New Zealand.

[Alex Kendall]

I think I ran through an amber light.

[Katie Prescott]

Did you?

[Alex Kendall]

Yes.

[Katie Prescott]

Is that what inspired you to start the business?

[Alex Kendall]

I wouldn't say I'm a terrible driver, but I did pass my second time. But I've never actually owned a car except my company has a fleet, so I don't know how you define that, but yeah, to be honest, I get bored by long car journeys. I would much rather use my time for something else than spend time behind the wheel. And so being able to build autonomous systems is something that would please me as a customer.

[Katie Prescott]

How are you dealing with all the pressure on you at the moment? Because I see wave everywhere. You're like the great British AI Hope in so many ways. And people talk about you as you know, you are the leading British, one of the leading British AI companies. And your life must have changed immeasurably since you founded the business. But also now with this huge investment you've got and growing globally. Yeah. How are you kind of mentally shouldering that?

[Alex Kendall]

Well, thank you for that. I think we're still very early on in our novel, only in the first few chapters, and I found this just to be a whole adventure. Right. Every year is just presented new things. Like this year, traveling around the world, working on multi year long Deals with major car manufacturers that are worth billions of dollars to bring cars to millions of vehicles. I mean, this is something that even just last year, of course, building up the technology to be able to drive safely on these roads, every year brings a new challenge. So I love that challenge. I love the learning and growth that comes with it. It feels like whenever I get good at a skill or comfortable with the process, we outgrow it. And I love living in that. That zone of uncomfortableness. And I also think there's been a proportionality to the growth. I mean, it hasn't just happened overnight. This has been 8 years, even longer during my PhD as well. Over my whole life, I've been working on robotics, so it's been many years in the making. We let our results do the talking. And I think I'm really proud of. For us, being able to drive for an hour under Autonomy throughout central London, it's a really proud moment. We do show this with more confidence now because we feel like it's ready to bring to the world and feel confident about the evidence and capabilities that we have, that it can actually bring those benefits to the world. It's not adding hype or false promises, but genuinely, this is something that will change. The cities we live in does not have the limitations of the earlier iterations of autonomous driving technology, but is something that can drive worldwide with the level of intelligence that. That can actually be safe and useful.

[Katie Prescott]

We're back. We're turning back into your offices. Amazing.

[Alex Kendall]

Yes. Here we are back at Wave headquarters in Kings Crossing Park.

[Katie Prescott]

Line bikes in the middle of the road and a lorry that's unloading.

[Alex Kendall]

One more negotiation just if you hadn't had enough. But here we are back at the office and take it back means that beep means we've finally disengaged autonomy after an hour of driving through central London. And here we are. We'll just manually drive it back into our garage and get on with our lives.

[Katie Prescott]

You know when you said one of your favorite things is driving around Soho in the evenings? Did you do that sometimes just for fun?

[Alex Kendall]

Yeah, yeah. It's sometimes. Friday night spin, Friday night, date night, cruising ground in the autonomous vehicle.

[Katie Prescott]

That's pretty cool.

[Danny Fortson]

Is it the future?

[Katie Prescott]

I think it's the future. I think it's. It's incredibly impressive. It is the second time I've been in a Wave car. As I said in the interview, it felt like the technology had come on leaps and bounds. Alex seemed to feel more relaxed about it as well. It's very surreal. And I know you're used to this, so forgive me for getting a bit overexcited about it, but it is very, very surreal when you sit in the back of the car and you see the steering wheel moving by itself.

[Danny Fortson]

It's the first time the steering wheel moves. It's like a visceral experience, right, of like, whoa.

[Katie Prescott]

And then seeing it navigate these incredibly complicated situations. And it was funny being in the car with Alex, because it was like sitting next to a driving instructor. You know when you're learning to drive.

[Alex Kendall]

Oh, look.

[Katie Prescott]

Oh, watch out for your lap. Oh, there's a cyclist coming up. Make sure it comes out the other side and all of that stuff. So he's. He's looking at it, all of these hazards. He's watching all these hazards all the time, but through an AI lens. So he's a combination of driving and structure and machine learning. PhD. So he gets geekily fascinated, as you could hear about, like, the problem, the conundrum posed by a double roundabout.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

But it was very impressive to see the car navigate it so confidently, because London is not an easy place to drive in. And if you think of all of the problems that you could replace with driverless cars, people drinking, people being on the phone, you so many. This is a terrible admission. I had to do a speed awareness course recently. Do you know what that is?

[Danny Fortson]

Basically, you got caught, you got a ticket. A speeding ticket.

[Katie Prescott]

I got a speeding ticket. I didn't. Wasn't going very fast. I was doing something like 24 in a 20 zone. To be fair to me, I don't drive very often in London. But anyway, I did get caught. And so to avoid getting points and you're like, license. You do a speed awareness course. And the driving instructor was going through. I think it was actually a policeman saying, what are the things that make you drive too fast? It's being angry, it's being anxious, it's being stressed. How can you mitigate those circumstances? You're like, well, if the car's driven by a computer.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. I also sometimes drive fast when there's a good song on and I'm like, rocking out.

[Katie Prescott]

Do that, though.

[Danny Fortson]

No, it wouldn't. It wouldn't.

[Katie Prescott]

Danny, before we go, there's one last piece of major tech news that's happening. It's happening today.

[Danny Fortson]

Oh, yeah, do tell.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, the Timestake podcast has. Has a terrific producer called Callum McCrae and he's. Yes, he's leaving.

[Danny Fortson]

It's so sad. It's so sad. Cue the sad music. Callum, as your last act on this podcast, can you cue in some sad music for this next bit? This is a sad day for the Times Tech Podcast because you've basically launched this and I was doing the Danny in the Valley thing on my own out here in the wilderness for years on Less Than a Shoestring. So to have you come in and be like a total pro and actually make us sound way smarter than we are has been a total. Just an amazing experience for me and we're very sad to see you go.

[Katie Prescott]

No, we really are. You've been absolutely fantastic and we will miss you very much.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, you've made this thing what it is, which I totally appreciate and I'm sure I know what you do too, Katie.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, absolutely. Wish us luck, listeners, on our journey without Callum.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes, yes. Our calumnious existence. It's going to be tough.

[Katie Prescott]

Maybe we can turn him into an AI. Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast was sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio.

[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

One of the features is PDF Spaces, which brings brings PDFs, Microsoft 365 files and websites together in shared spaces.

[Katie Prescott]

It helps centralize notes and draft documents so you can see the full picture of a project all on a secure platform.

[Danny Fortson]

There's also an AI assistant which can summarize information, pull out key insights and help you understand what's in your files without reading everything manually, which helps if

[Katie Prescott]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

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