GM’s Cruise now has 1,800 employees working on self-driving cars, up from 1,000 in March 2019

During GM’s investor day conference in New York this morning, Dan Ammann, CEO of the automaker’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise Automation, gave a glimpse at the progress it’s made toward a fully self-driving vehicle fleet. He said that Cruise’s engineers, of which there are now 1,800 (up from 1,000 in March 2019), have over the past four years helped improve autonomous driving performance by a factor of well over 1,000. Concretely, they’ve reduced the amount of time between major software updates by 98% while cutting the time it takes to train the AI underpinning its cars by 80%, such that major new firmware rolls out up 45 times more frequently than before (as often as twice weekly).