Anthony Levandowski was still in college when the legend of his engineering prowess began to outstrip the reality.
As an undergraduate, he was feted by the University of California Berkeley after winning an engineering competition by building a robot out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money. That early success – cited in profiles by the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and others – became a key plot point in the origin story of a Silicon Valley superhero: the man credited more than any other with Google’s groundbreaking development of autonomous vehicles.
The only problem with the story, according to Levandowski’s faculty adviser at the time, is that it’s not quite accurate.
“The claim that he was going to sort Monopoly money made a good story,” said Roger Glassey, professor emeritus at Berkeley’s industrial engineering school. “But what he actually did was sort cards that were black and white. It made it a lot easier.”
The difference between sorting pastel-colored Monopoly money versus black and white paper may seem relatively minor. (Nathan Ballard, spokesman for Levandowski, said by email, “The robot was indeed capable of sorting Monopoly money, just not very well.”)
But as a blockbuster trade secrets trial between Uber and Google’s self-driving car company, Waymo, kicks off on Monday, it is instructive of the distance between the stories Silicon Valley tells us about its grand, world-changing innovations, and the prosaic and occasionally sordid reality.
Levandowski is the central figure in this bitter dispute between multibillion-dollar behemoths. Last February, just as Uber’s year of reckoning was getting started, Waymo filed a lawsuit accusing Uber of the “calculated theft” of its self-driving car technology. The complaint read like a detective novel and transformed tenuous allies – Alphabet was an investor in Uber and had a director on its board – into adversaries.
The suit also exploded the prevailing narrative of Uber’s autonomous vehicle ambitions, transforming Levandowski from wunderkind to supervillain overnight.
After his success with the Lego robot, Levandowski went on to lead a team in the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge, a US government-funded contest that challenged engineers to develop and race autonomous vehicles 150 miles across the Mojave desert. (The decision to use a motorcycle instead of a car landed the team in the Smithsonian but severely limited their ability to actually compete: the bike fell over right out of the gate.)
He went on to work for Google, first on maps and later on autonomous cars, where he played a central role until he quit without notice in January 2016.
The events leading up to Levandowski’s abrupt departure from Google will now be placed before a San Francisco jury.
The original narrative, established in an August 2016 feature in Bloomberg, was that Levandowski left Google to found his own company, Otto, where he planned to develop self-driving technology for trucks. The startup and its engineering talent caught the interest of Uber’s then CEO, Travis Kalanick, who considered self-driving cars an existential necessity for the ride-hail business. A courtship began, with Kalanick wooing the star engineer on long evening walks to the Golden Gate Bridge in spring 2016.
“I feel like we’re brothers from another mother,” Kalanick told Bloomberg in the feature that also announced Uber’s acquisition of Otto and installation of Levandowski as head of its self-driving car program.
That Levandowski would have walked away from Google’s moonshot factory to build his own self-driving car technology from scratch in a Palo Alto garage, only to succeed to the tune of a reported $680m acquisition within a few months was a damn good story.
It was also, as the lawsuit has revealed, not quite accurate.
Starting today an alternative and decidedly unsavory version of events will be put to jurors, who will hear about a courtship that actually began while Levandowski was still working for Google – and about the engineer’s alleged illicit downloading of 14,000 secret documents from Google’s servers.
Uber has not denied that Levandowski took the files, while the engineer has invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. Uber does dispute Waymo’s allegations that Otto was merely a smokescreen established to launder the acquisition of stolen intellectual property, and argues that there is no evidence that any of Waymo’s trade secrets made their way to Uber.
“Anthony denies any wrongdoing,” said Ballard.
No matter how the jury finds, the year-long back and forth between the two companies has dragged into the light a host of ugly secrets, from the embarrassing text messages exchanged by Kalanick and Levandowski (“Down to hang this eve and mastermind some shit,” Kalanick texted in October 2016) to the letter by a former Uber employee detailing allegations of “unethical and unlawful intelligence collections” by a secretive Uber security team.
The pitched battle does make one thing clear: for all the talk of safety and world-changing innovation, when it comes to autonomous vehicles, the corporate players are really racing toward a giant pot of money.
As for Levandowski, the 37-year-old was fired by Uber after failing to cooperate with its investigation into Waymo’s claim. The erstwhile Icarus now appears to have turned his attention to divine matters: he has founded the Way of the Future, a church that intends to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence”.
