Ben Gilbert

The double-popped collar.

I think there were two.

They were sort of a duopoly.

Navtech was the other one.

Yeah, Navtech and Tela Atlas.

But it was this like kind of crappy source of truth map data that everyone used and you really couldn't do any better than anyone else because you all just use the same data.

Yeah.

And Sebastian's first thing was Street View, right?

So he already had the experience of orchestrating this fleet of all these cars to drive around and take pictures.

Mostly from their own photographs of streets from Street View.

And they incorporated some other data.

There was like census data they used.

I think it was 40 something data sources to bring it all together.

But Ground Truth was this very ambitious effort to create new maps from whole cloth.

Well, especially when you hire a thousand people in India to help you sift through all the discrepancies in the data and actually hand draw all the maps.

Win, win, win.

And Jeff Hinton, for anybody who doesn't know the name, now very much known as the godfather of neural networks and really the godfather of kind of the whole direction that AI went in.

Modern AI.

He was kind of a fringe academic.

Yeah.