[EmployedRussian]

The article addresses this question:

“I think this is the first time autonomous driving has been approached so strongly from a deep learning perspective,” says Tandon. “This is in contrast to a traditional robotics approach,” continues Carol Reiley, cofounder and President. “A lot of companies are just using deep learning for this component or that component, while we view it more holistically,” says Reiley.

and

"This is why many companies working on vehicle autonomy are more comfortable with using traditional robotics approaches for decision making, and restrict deep learning to perception. They reason: If your system makes an incorrect decision, you’d want to be able to figure out exactly what happened, and then make sure that the mistake won’t be repeated."

“This is a big problem,” Tandon acknowledges.

[deepnotderp]

Nvidia has been demonstrating end to end deep learning for a long time....Andrew Ng's talks imply that Baidu's SDCs are also based on end to end.

[ibrahima]

Hmm, it might be worth noting that two of the cofounders of Drive.ai are Andrew Ng's PhD student and his wife. Not sure what that means in terms of how much, if any, collaboration there is between Drive.ai and Baidu.