TechCrunch Mobility: The AI skills arms race is coming for automotive

TechCrunch Mobility：AI 技能军备竞赛正席卷汽车行业

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There is a bit of a theme emerging in transportation — and really every industry: AI is creating jobs for some at the loss of others. General Motors, for instance, laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees — in a deliberate skills swap. This won’t translate into a one-to-one exchange, which means there will likely be a net-negative job loss. But GM insists it is hiring and those layoffs have made room for it to recruit IT people with AI-focused backgrounds. 交通运输领域——实际上是所有行业——正在出现一个主题：AI 在为一部分人创造就业机会的同时，也导致了另一部分人的失业。例如，通用汽车（General Motors）裁减了其 IT 部门超过 10% 的员工，即约 600 名受薪员工，这是一次刻意的技能置换。这并不会转化为一对一的岗位互换，这意味着最终可能会出现净失业。但通用汽车坚称公司正在招聘，这些裁员为招募具有 AI 背景的 IT 人才腾出了空间。

The most sought-after capabilities are AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, prompt engineering, and new AI workflows. In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines — not just use AI as a productivity tool. 目前最抢手的能力包括：AI 原生开发、数据工程与分析、云端工程、智能体（Agent）与模型开发、提示词工程（Prompt Engineering）以及新的 AI 工作流。从实际层面来看，通用汽车正在寻找那些懂得如何从零开始构建 AI 的人才——即设计系统、训练模型和构建工程管线，而不仅仅是将 AI 作为一种生产力工具来使用。

Those AI job losses are mounting in the automotive sector. CNBC calculated that Ford, GM, and Stellantis have cut a combined total of more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs, or 19% of their combined workforces, from recent employment peaks this decade. While there are a variety of reasons for these cuts, they are generally connected to technological changes, including AI. Companies are leaning heavily into AI, although anecdotes from some engineers and founders suggests not all of these businesses know quite what they’re doing with it yet. 汽车行业的 AI 相关裁员正在增加。据 CNBC 计算，福特、通用汽车和 Stellantis 自本十年就业高峰以来，已累计裁减了超过 20,000 个美国受薪岗位，占其总员工数的 19%。尽管裁员原因多种多样，但通常都与包括 AI 在内的技术变革有关。企业正大力向 AI 倾斜，尽管一些工程师和创始人的轶事表明，并非所有企业都完全清楚如何利用 AI。

Samsara is one company that seems to have figured out a revenue-generating use case. The company has spent the last decade giving its customers cameras to mount inside millions of trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention, and helping with liability claims. The company took that mountain of data and trained its own model that can detect potholes and determine how quickly they are deteriorating. The company is pitching this product to cities and announced it has several under contract, including Chicago. Samsara 似乎是找到了一种能够产生收入的用例的公司。过去十年里，该公司一直为客户提供安装在数百万辆卡车内的摄像头，用于驾驶员监控、防盗以及协助处理责任索赔。该公司利用这些海量数据训练了自己的模型，能够检测坑洼并判断其恶化速度。该公司正向各城市推销此产品，并宣布已与包括芝加哥在内的多个城市签订了合同。

Deals!

交易动态！

You might have noticed that Rivian’s spinoff company Mind Robotics raised another $400 million, just two months after raising $500 million. And that pace got me thinking about its founder RJ Scaringe and his innate ability to get VC and institutional backers to invest in his ideas and projects. I calculated that investors have poured $12.3 billion into Scaringe’s three startups — Also, Mind Robotics, and Rivian. That figure doesn’t include the close to $12 billion in gross proceeds raised in Rivian’s IPO, nor did I count the more recent strategic deals with Volkswagen Group and Uber — which together could add nearly $7 billion to Rivian’s coffers. 您可能已经注意到，Rivian 的分拆公司 Mind Robotics 在融资 5 亿美元仅两个月后，又筹集了 4 亿美元。这种融资速度让我思考其创始人 RJ Scaringe 以及他让风投和机构支持者投资其想法和项目的内在能力。我计算出，投资者已向 Scaringe 的三家初创公司（Also、Mind Robotics 和 Rivian）投入了 123 亿美元。这个数字还不包括 Rivian 在 IPO 中筹集的近 120 亿美元总收益，也没有计入最近与大众汽车集团和 Uber 的战略交易——这些交易总共可能为 Rivian 的金库增加近 70 亿美元。

I spoke to a number of insiders and investors and they all mentioned Scaringe’s ability to give undivided attention to whoever he’s talking to — whether it’s an investor, supplier, or exec — and make them feel like the most important person in the room. It’s yet another piece of evidence in my long-standing case against multitasking. 我与多位内部人士和投资者交谈，他们都提到了 Scaringe 的一种能力：无论与谁交谈——无论是投资者、供应商还是高管——他都能全神贯注，让对方感到自己是房间里最重要的人。这又是我长期反对多任务处理观点的又一证据。

Notable reads and other tidbits

值得阅读的内容及其他花絮

Is Redwood Materials ready for an IPO? Senior reporter Sean O’Kane interviewed the company’s new CFO, Deepak Ahuja, whose name will be familiar to anyone who follows Tesla. Ahuja was Tesla’s former finance chief and most recently held a similar position at drone company Zipline. Redwood Materials 准备好 IPO 了吗？ 资深记者 Sean O’Kane 采访了该公司的新任首席财务官 Deepak Ahuja，关注特斯拉的人对他一定很熟悉。Ahuja 是特斯拉前财务主管，最近在无人机公司 Zipline 担任过类似职位。
Tesla Robotaxis have crashed at least twice since July 2025 while a teleoperator was remotely driving the vehicles, according to newly unredacted information submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 根据提交给美国国家公路交通安全管理局（NHTSA）的最新解密信息，自 2025 年 7 月以来，特斯拉 Robotaxi 在远程操作员驾驶期间至少发生了两次碰撞事故。
Uber is expanding in India with two new engineering campuses that can fit about 9,600 people and a data center partnership aimed at supporting its overall product development and infrastructure operations. Uber 正在印度扩张，新建了两个可容纳约 9,600 人的工程园区，并建立了数据中心合作伙伴关系，旨在支持其整体产品开发和基础设施运营。
Waymo issued a software update to its fleet of nearly 4,000 vehicles to help them avoid flooded roads as part of a recall announced by the NHTSA. Important note: The company hasn’t fully solved the problem of how its vehicles behave in these conditions. 作为 NHTSA 宣布的召回计划的一部分，Waymo 为其近 4,000 辆车队发布了软件更新，以帮助它们避开洪水路段。重要提示：该公司尚未完全解决其车辆在这些条件下如何表现的问题。

One more thing …

还有一件事……

Disrupt, our flagship annual tech conference in San Francisco, will be held in October. And while that is a ways off, I wanted to share one bit of news. We will have six stages this year. One worth noting for this crowd is our AI in the Real World Stage. It will be here that we’ll dig into robotics. 我们年度旗舰科技大会 Disrupt 将于 10 月在旧金山举行。虽然还有一段时间，但我还是想分享一个消息。今年我们将设有六个舞台。对于在座各位来说，值得关注的是我们的“现实世界中的 AI”舞台（AI in the Real World Stage）。我们将在这里深入探讨机器人技术。