Rachel Coldicutt is the founder of Careful Industries, which researches the social impact technology has on society.
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Wayve, a UK-born startup developing a self-learning rather than rule-based system for autonomous driving, has closed a $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the UK’s largest AI fundraise ever and sits among the top 20 AI fundraises globally to date.
Also participating in the raise was NVIDIA and existing investor Microsoft. Waye’s early stage investors included Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun.
Wayve, which was founded in Cambridge in 2017, raised $200m in a series B round in January last year led by Eclipse Ventures.
The company plans to use the fresh capital injection to develop its product for “eyes on” assisted driving and “yes off” fully automated driving, other AI-assisted automotive applications, and expand operations globally.
San Francisco has become known as the epicenter for autonomous driving roll-outs, with Alphabet-owned Waymo and GM-owned Cruise both operating services in the city. By contrast, Wayve’s “end-to-end” self-driving system began its life around the tiny streets of Cambridge on an electric Renault Twizy.
Since then, it has been training its model on delivery vehicles for the likes of companies like UK grocery delivery company Ocado, which invested $13.6 million in the startup.
Wayve’s approach to autonomous driving is similar to Tesla’s, but Wayve plans to sell its autonomous driving model to a variety of auto OEMs. The implication, of course, is that Wayve will garner a great deal more training data on which to improve its model, as Tesla must rely on someone buying their car brand. The company has not announced any such automotive partners yet, however.
Wayve calls its hardware-agnostic mapless product an “Embodied AI”, and it plans to distribute its platform not just to car makers but also to robotics companies serving manufacturers of all descriptions, allowing the platform to learn from human behavior in a wide variety of real-world environments. The company’s research on multimodal and generative models, known as LINGO and GAIA, will offer “language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles, and co-piloting,” the firm promises.
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall told Techcrunch: “Seven years ago, we started the company to go build an embodied AI. We have been heads down building technology … What happened last year was everything really started to work.”
He said the key moment has been the automotive industry’s “step change” into having cameras surrounding new cars, from which Wayve can draw data for its autonomous platform: “Now their production vehicles are coming out with GPUs, surrounding cameras, radar, and of course the appetite to now bring AI onto, and enable, an accelerated journey from assisted to automated driving. So this fundraise is a validation of our technological approach, and gives us the capital to go and turn this technology into product and bring this this this product to market.”
He added that Wayve has big plans for robotics as well.
“Very soon you’ll be able to buy a new car, and it’ll have Wayve’s AI on it… Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”
In a move that signified the importance of this fundraise more broadly to the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak issued a supporting statement saying: “From the first electric light bulb or the World Wide Web, to AI and self-driving cars – the UK has a proud record of being at the forefront of some of the biggest technological advancements in history.”
“I’m incredibly proud that the UK is the home for pioneers like Wayve who are breaking ground as they develop the next generation of AI models for self-driving cars. The fact that a homegrown, British business has secured the biggest investment yet in a UK AI company is a testament to our leadership in this industry, and that our plan for the economy is working,” he said.
“We are leaving no stone unturned to create the economic conditions for businesses to grow and thrive in the UK. We already have the third highest number of AI companies and private investment in AI in the world, and this announcement anchors the UK’s position as an AI superpower,” he added.
Also in a statement, Kentaro Matsui, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and a Wayve boardmember said: “AI is revolutionizing mobility… The potential of this type of technology is transformative; it could eliminate 99% of traffic accidents. SoftBank Group is delighted to be at the forefront of this effort with Wayve, as advanced intelligence redefines mobility and connectivity, contributing to a more convenient and safer society.”
It seems we’re all in agreement: Kendrick Lamar defeated Drake in one of the most engrossing rap battles of the decade. To add insult to injury, Drake also threw himself into legal hot water when he deepfaked the late rapper Tupac.
The tension between Lamar and Drake goes back decades, but this latest flare-up began last fall when J. Cole dropped a song calling Drake, Lamar and himself the “Big Three” in rap. This March, Lamar finally responded, rejecting Cole’s assertion with a scathing verse that dissed him and Drake. The battle ignited, and soon, a legion of other hip-hop artists jumped in, releasing music and taking their sides against Drake.
The weeks-long dispute escalated into one of the most intense rap battles of the digital era. There were side battles (between Chris Brown and Quavo), and white flags (J. Cole apologized to Lamar and deleted his diss response to the rapper). Meanwhile, social media created campaigns and giveaways against Drake, and support for diss tracks against him appeared in everything from Japanese rap to Indian classical dance.
The feud has also sparked a conversation about technology’s increased role in rap beefs, in addition to how and when AI should be used in music.
A pivotal moment came on the track “Taylor Made,” where Drake attempted to diss Lamar using AI vocals from Snoop Dogg and Tupac, a rap icon who was killed decades ago. Drake did not get permission from Tupac’s estate to use the late rapper’s vocals and was threatened with a lawsuit unless he removed the track. Even though Drake took it down, his decision to use AI vocals promoted discussion among music lovers and techies alike.
(Lamar and Drake could not be reached for comment by the time of publication).
An artist like Tupac, who died in 1996, couldn’t have imagined that artificial intelligence could emulate his voice so convincingly that one of the most popular rappers of the moment would insert it into a song. He also couldn’t have understood how the nature of the social internet would shape the future of music, where “every stream is a vote.”
In the early aughts, rappers had to funnel their diss tracks through radio, releasing physical albums and mixtapes while giving interviews throughout the years of a feud. Responding to a diss could take days at the most, whereas today, it could take mere seconds.
Lamar released a diss response to Drake within 20 minutes of Drake dropping his track against Lamar. Lamar insinuated there were leaks in Drake’s camp that made it possible for him to drop so fast, and that’s a diss in itself. Before the internet was so ubiquitous, that speed would have been impossible.
Drake’s response to his feud with Meek Mill nearly 10 years ago saw him release two songs within four days. But Lamar dropped four songs within five days during this battle, including two in one day. Nobody had to rush out to buy CDs or pull over their cars to listen to the radio, as one founder recalled doing during Jay Z’s infamous feud with Nas. Instead, tracks were quickly dropped on YouTube, shared on Twitter, and then streamed on Spotify en loop.
The speed of these releases does have its downsides: In another viral moment, Lamar’s lyrics confused actor Haley Joel Osment and televangelist Joel Osteen.
Fans have also called Drake “chronically online” during the rap battle, since their real-time posts about the raps seemed to influence him. Some fans accused him of referencing popular tweets and memes people made about him during the feud, then passing them off as his own thoughts and rapping about them. Numerous people online commented that it felt like Drake was writing his responses specifically for his fans to hear, rather than to respond to Lamar. That nearly instantaneous feedback loop stood in stark contrast with Lamar’s raps, which were poignant in their attacks solely against Drake.
This battle is also perhaps the first time such beef has expanded to tech platforms on a wide scale. Lamar fans used Google Maps to virtually vandalize Drake’s mansion, renaming it “Owned by Kendrick.” Streamers pulled long hours on platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Kick, waiting to see if they could be among the first to react to a newly dropped song.
Anthony Fantano, a popular music YouTuber, published no less than six different live reaction videos responding to Drake and Lamar’s songs dropped over the last two weeks. These kinds of reaction videos became so popular that creators are saying that Lamar (or his team) removed copyright restrictions from these songs, meaning they can profit from their videos. This move alone could give more meaning to the role of hip-hop reaction pundit.
The Kendrick-Drake feud is also the first mainstream rap battle to use AI.
Artists across genres are reckoning with the coexisting threat and potential of this technology. Some have embraced AI as an opportunity: The art pop duo Yacht trained an AI on 14 years of their music to create the record “Chain Tripping” in 2019; Holly Herndon and Grimes have both developed tools for other artists to generate AI deep fakes using their voices. Other artists like Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry have protested against the use of AI to undermine human creativity.
Consent is a primary concern in artists’ debates about AI-generated music. Artists care so much about what their peers are doing because the use of AI implicates them all — unbeknown to them, their music might be used to train an AI model that another artist is using to supplement their music.
While Herndon is at the forefront of musical experimentation with AI, she also advocates for artists to retain control over their work. She uses AI in her art, but she is also a founder of Spawning, a startup that creates tools for artists that help them remove their work from popular AI training datasets. Meanwhile, chillwave musician Washed Out just released a controversial music video made entirely using Open AI’s Sora, a text-to-video model that has not yet been released to the public.
Tupac’s estate would argue that Drake crossed a line because he didn’t have consent to emulate the late rapper. But Rich Fortune, the co-founder of AI-powered social planning app Hangtight, said it was it creative that Drake was one of the first artists to use AI in a song, especially on a diss track. Fortune says, “There aren’t any rules in a battle.”
“If there were any time to see what the reaction would be, it would be now because punches aren’t pulled when at war,” he continued. He thinks that more artists will now seek to use AI vocals since Drake, one of the biggest artists in the world, effectively sanctioned its use.
In fact, one diss track against Drake in this feud used AI-generated work, and has since turned into a meme against him. Producer Metro Boomin took an AI song called BBL Drizzy and sampled it onto a track that has become one of the rallying cries against the rapper.
Meanwhile, artists as big as Beyoncé have taken a stance against the increasing presence of AI. In one of the few public comments she’s made about her genre-bending album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé said: “The more I see the world evolving, the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”
Fortune said the biggest hurdle now for artists who want to use AI is just getting permission. Living artists might not be so keen to be AI replicated, but the estates of late musicians might be. The problem there is that many old-school artists who have died, like Tupac, can’t consent to being mimicked because AI-generated music was not a technology conceived before their deaths.
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s the direction we’re headed,” Fortune said about using the work of late musicians. At the very least, he said, it opens up a new revenue source for the estates of the artists who don’t mind them being artificially reincarnated.
The Kendrick-Drake feud also unveiled another point about AI: Its potential ability to emulate artists with a less unique style. Luke Bailey, the founder of the fintech Neon Money Club, said Drake’s more recent music lacks depth. That, paired with the allegations that Drake was so directly and deliberately drawing inspiration from what he saw on the internet, raises the concern that he is doing something that an AI bot could one day do.
“There are two types of musicians: One who can play what someone tells her or him to play and one who can create something original from scratch,” Bailey said. “AI is the former at this stage in its development.”
Bailey is right. Large language models (LLMs), the type of artificial intelligence that powers most deepfake tools, are inherently uncreative. These models synthesize gigantic swaths of data and then respond to a user-generated prompt by predicting the most likely response.
But the most celebrated music often takes the opposite approach: Just look at Kendrick Lamar, a rapper whose bars are so complex that he remains the only non-classical and jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize. He’s often regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in music and is known for his commentary on race and politics. AI right now lacks the cultural nuance to form its own thoughts on society, not to mention something as nuanced as race.
“[AI] can’t copy Kendrick’s depth, only his voice,” Bailey said, adding that fans have heard pretty convincing AI-generated Drake songs in the past. “AI doesn’t have any potent bars yet.”
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