The British autonomous-vehicle software startup Wayve is bringing together a dream team of "top-tier AI research talent" to look beyond self-driving cars.
The company is launching a new research unit called Wayve Labs, led by Wayve chief scientist Jamie Shotton, a former Microsoft executive with a Ph.D. in computer vision from the University of Cambridge. The lab will focus on embodied intelligence, or AI systems that can understand and act in the physical world.
Shotton, who has worked at Wayve for nearly five years, said the lab aims to push the company's research beyond self-driving cars and explore how its AI models could apply to other physical-world systems.
"The lab is really about taking Wayve to the next level as a company and anticipating things five years down the road," Shotton told Business Insider.
The lab will study how to teach machines to understand space, motion, cause and effect, and risk—including learning from the consequences of their actions and handling messy situations. Wayve does not have immediate plans to commercialize the lab's research.
Dozens of Wayve employees already work at the lab. Wayve, which has main offices in London, Vancouver, and the San Francisco Bay Area, also plans to recruit AI researchers and machine learning engineers to publish research and develop new models for the lab.
In February, Wayve announced it raised $1.5 billion from a group of Big Tech companies and major automakers, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, valuing the startup at $8.6 billion. Wayve and Uber have a deal to launch self-driving vehicles on Uber's app in more than 10 markets worldwide, starting with London this year.
Unlike Tesla or Waymo, Wayve focuses on developing software for other companies looking to deploy self-driving cars, and it's not building its own robotaxi fleet.
Shotton said the idea for the lab came from recognizing that engineering teams often do not have time to think deeply about the future. Wayve Labs aims to bring researchers together to study what the company has learned from autonomous driving and apply those lessons to other forms of robotics.
It is also a return to Wayve's research roots. Cambridge machine learning researchers Amar Shah and Alex Kendall founded the company in 2017, believing they could train self-driving cars with AI rather than hand-coded rules and highly detailed maps. The self-driving car industry now widely embraces that approach, once considered contrarian.
Shotton said Wayve Labs has a strong position for the work because it can draw on Wayve's autonomous-driving data, compute resources, and funding.
"There's a wide horizon in front of us," Shotton said.