Johana Bhuiyan for Recode:
The Chinese company’s new U.S. lab, which will focus on intelligent driving systems and AI-based security for transportation, also formalizes what many already knew: Didi is working on self-driving cars.
The company has already partnered with Udacity — a college-level nanodegree startup — on its self-driving program, at the end of which Didi and a number of other partnering companies get first pick of the graduates the companies want to hire.
Didi did not only acquired Uber China assets last year but it is also actively poaching AV talent from Google Waymo and Uber itself.
I can just but imagine the potential of AVs deployed at a Didi scale in China in a near future.