Uber Technologies Inc and Google Inc have long been bitter rivals in the race to build the autonomous vehicles that appear integral to the future of transportation. Soon, Uber will have a bit of help in that effort from a man who played a key role at Google.
Amit Singhal, a 15-year Google veteran and a former senior vice president for search at the company, on Friday said that he planned to join Uber as senior vice president for engineering. At Uber, he will work to build out the software and infrastructure that are the foundation of the company’s ride-hailing services.
Singhal will report to Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick and lead the company’s mapping division and a unit that runs the dispatching, marketing and pricing of Uber cars. He will also advise Anthony Levandowski, who runs the company’s self-driving automobile efforts.
“It’s hard enough to connect millions of drivers to millions of riders in real time while creating optimal routes for drivers,” Singhal wrote in a post on his personal blog on Friday. “Add to that the twist of predicting real-time traffic, pooling multiple riders and making the system economically attractive for everyone — and now you have one of the most challenging computer science problems I’ve encountered in my 30-year career.”
The hiring of Singhal, who left Google last year, is a coup for Uber, which has stated its intention to fight Google’s substantial head start in autonomous-vehicle research. Uber has poached multiple high-level employees from Google over the past seven years, including Levandowski.
Early in Uber’s history, it and Google were more allies than enemies. Google highlighted the Uber app in its maps application as a mode of transportation, and GV, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc, has invested hundreds of millions of US dollars in Uber.
However, since it became clearer that Uber and Google would compete in the development of self-driving vehicles and in other areas, the companies have grown apart. Google offers a type of carpooling service in the San Francisco area through Waze, a mapping app it owns. And David Drummond, a top Google executive, left his position on the Uber board of directors last year.
Singhal’s move to Uber ratchets up the rivalry. Hired by Google in 2000, he was the company’s 176th employee and he rewrote many of the original search algorithms created by the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Singhal is credited as one of the engineers who built the smarter and faster search engine that gave Google what proved to be an insurmountable advantage in Web search. When Singhal left his position as Google’s head of search in February last year, he said he planned to focus on philanthropy.
“I love Amit’s excitement for solving complex computer science problems and his passion for helping improve people’s lives through technology,” Kalanick said in a statement. “The team at Uber, myself included, will learn a lot from him.”
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