Uber is holding its Uber Elevate conference on flying vehicles this week in Los Angeles, where it also revealed a variety of aircraft designs (shown above), and offered some other details:
Initially, a ride in the sky will cost a passenger $5.73 per mile, then Uber hopes to eventually get the cost down to 44 cents per mile, which would be comparable to the cost of owning and driving a car.Uber’s goal is to conduct demonstration flights in 2020.
UberAIR plans to begin commercial service in 2023 in Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles, and has dropped Dubai from its plans.
It plans airspeeds up to 200 mph and cruising altitudes of 1,000 to 2,000 feet — higher than drones but lower than small aircraft or jetliners.
Its eVTOL aircraft would travel 60 miles on a charge.
Here is an animated rendition of what this flying taxi service might look like:
Yes, this is complex stuff. But this video is fascinating no matter who watches…
Lobe is an easy-to-use visual tool that lets you build custom deep learning models, quickly train them, and ship them directly in your app without writing any code. Start by dragging in a folder of training examples from your desktop. Lobe automatically builds you a custom deep learning model and begins training. When you’re done, you can export a trained model and ship it directly in your app.
It’s a completely visual tool from designer Mike Matas and his co-founders Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges. I am always interested in anything Matas does, and Lobe is no exception.
You build and edit Lobe models through a web interface, and there’s a cloud API developers can use for finished models in production. But Lobe also exports to CoreML (for Apple platforms) and TensorFlow. My analogy: writing CoreML by hand is like writing PostScript by hand — possible, but only by a small number of talented experts. Lobe is to CoreML what Illustrator was to PostScript — a profoundly powerful tool that exposes the underlying technology to non-experts through an intuitive visual interface. Lobe looks utterly Matas-ian.
If you have any interest whatsoever in machine learning, drop what you’re doing right now and watch their 13-minute introductory tour. And if you’re not interested in machine learning, watch the video anyway and you’ll become interested in machine learning. It looks that amazing.