"Magic Leap filed late Thursday in federal court after the two workers, Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler, sued the company for wrongful termination earlier this week."
Both of these guys are listed as Vice President's - Kaehler as VP Special Projects - and Bradski as VP of Advanced technology, that's no small deal.
More info of the allegations in a NY Times article (1)
This is particularly interesting since Gary Bradski is also a Co-Founder of Industrial Perception Inc., a robotics company that Google acquired in 2013.
Reportedly Bradski walked away from Google right after the deal to join early Magic Leap, leaving lots of cash on the table and Google stock unvested.
He wrote the Learning OpenCV book but I'm not sure it's accurate to say he created openCV... It was created by intel internally (by a ton of folks like Vadim Pisarevsky) and later open sourced.
thanks! -- I didn't know the history. these notes are from 2008 (long after opencv was open sourced) but it's clear from his linkedin page that he was a part of the founding team at intel.
Standard retaliatory tactic so they can tell investors the ex-employees are actually the bad apples and of course not the company.
The impression I get is that the only secret ML actually has is that they are years away from showing anything to validate their worth (by which point many competitors will have shown their cards and removed the 'magic' from the leap).
Gauging off their patents, they've got so much bleeding edge shit to pack into their device that I'm not expecting a consumer ready product from Magic Leap in less than 5 years. I'm just going to have to get used to people throwing around the 'vapourware' accusation in every Magic Leap thread I stumble across for some time to come.
> The reluctance for people to be skeptical of anything to do with Magic Leap is strange to me.
The propensity for people speaking for others trust channels is strange to me, but people still do it. Selling ones own beliefs on the coat tails of others beliefs probably isn't the best way to hard sell skepticism in a brand. That said, I'm more skeptical of Magic Leap's intent than yours, given I trust them about as far as I can throw a whale.
I applied for a job at Magic Leap. I applied for a cloud architect position, because I believe this technology is far more dangerous and insidious than we can begin to imagine. In fact, I believe it could be used to alter people's ability to perceive reality in a way that is life altering to the person wearing the device. I also think that other humans will use that altered realty to control each other.
This device should be impeccably secure, open, and transparent. The reality is that it will be full of security holes, closed source and geared toward profitability of the brands that makes them.
Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.
Subject matter as disturbing as this leads to dissonance in humans, as we have a hard time understanding/simulating all the ramifications at the outset. Dissonance from that misunderstanding leads to confusion and polarization. Polarization leads to endless arguing and rationalizing. And, nothing gets done in the meantime, other than the few people running the company getting richer on all the people gobbling up their products because they think they have to have them because everyone else does too. (I rationlize this is an observation, but it's still pretty blame-y). And, the worse part is, none of them will be really thinking about how bad guys can make really bad things happen when you can change what people see with a piece of code.
As for the job, well, I found their HR process error prone, the rhetoric about the technology disingenuous, and their lack of proper scheduling worrying. Busting meetings is not a great start to hiring people, or securing advanced technology from ill doers.
Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.
That is a cool scenario I've never thought through before. Interesting - thanks!
I don't want to move my hands, legs or any other part of my body so much. I watch stuff on my phone because I am too lazy to watch on TV . This stuff seems like so much work, do you really want to move pieces of puzzle when you can just flick your thumb.
I don't know if ML's tech is vapor or real, but I have a lot of respect for anyone who can get Larry Page to give them half a billion in cash. That right there is some seriously convincing talking.
fair point. I'd add that if a person has $10+ billion, already (or whatever his net worth is), then you can afford to risk blowing a few billion, here and there, on things which might turn into a loss. On the upside, he'd be better off and humanity would be better off. On the downside even if his bet failed and he and therefore the Page estate got reduced to a mere, say, $100 million in net wealth he and his children could still live out pretty good lives.
In other words, it might not have been as hard to convince him as one might think. "Gee, I can invest a big amount in a Theranos/MagicLeap/SpaceX or I can put it into the next random/fad-ish social/pic/buzz/RailsCRUD/BigData/leadgen/TODO/PM/cloud/viral/app startup. Hmmm, choices."
Well in this case it is the company's money, and lots of people within the company are "competing" for funding of their projects. Of course there is the reverse NIH effect which is that any technology invented outside of the company seems more impressive to leadership than technology created inside the company.
How much savings does the typical American family have to invest? It's around $1,000 (actually less). This investment would be a bit like a typical family investing $17 dollars in something. Or if you're going by the typical total net worth of an American (around $45k), it be like investing $800.
I'm sure he's is not in the habit of frivously making bad investments, but a $500M investment has the financial impact to Larry Page that purchasing a computer has to the typical American. Except that that computer purchase will probably affect the money left over to pay for bills, food, rent/mortgage, sending kids to college, etc. so really the financial impact on Larry is much, much less.
If they create something that convinces the average family to shell out $800, I'll be impressed.
Magic Leap's main product might be more than meets the eye. According to Quartz [1], there's probably more far-fetching tech that Magic Leap is working on that involves "deep learning techniques utilizing robotics," and Bradski's and Kaehler's termination forced their hand to divulge even the least bit of information. Maybe "artificial reality" is not a misnomer and the $4.5bn valuation is not just the AR.
Deep learning and robotics qualify as far fetched tech? Anyone with a laptop and one of a dozen open-source frameworks can get started with deep learning today. Rendering a 3D object that blends in real time with a person's perspective of their physical environment and beaming it directly into their retina seems far more far fetched.
Perhaps the deep learning using robotics is simply related to this larger task, for example controlling the projecting element to account for retina movement or something similar.
Just this week at the Twilio Signal conference they announced a partnership and that 10 devs from the Twilio community will be of the first group to build on their SDK... When asked if next year it would be more widely available, he said he would adapt a cheshire cat grin and say maybe... JeffL the CEO of Twilio said he's seen it and it is amazing. http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/magic-leap-partners-with-...
Has there been some suggested Roadmap when we can expect some unveiling? It's fun to see that people can get sued over unannounced tech, but I'd really like to know what we are talking about here.
Maybe I should have done on record somewhere sooner, but this is exactly what I expected out of secretive companies like this. Raise a bunch of money, produce nothing of substance, then have some kind of lawsuit action bring in some dough. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but if we ever have a single product from this company I'll be surprised.
Is "artificial reality" a term that AR/VR companies are actually starting to throw around, or is possible that the term arose out of reporters mistakenly thinking "AR" stands for stands for "artificial reality" and not "augmented reality"?
I interviewed with these guys and got an informal offer. I declined because of the number of hoops I'd have to jump through to see a demo of it in action. I learned my lesson about that sort of thing during the first dotcom boom.
Both of these guys are listed as Vice President's - Kaehler as VP Special Projects - and Bradski as VP of Advanced technology, that's no small deal.
More info of the allegations in a NY Times article (1)
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/05/27/business/ap-us-ar...