Text | Angie Li and Qin Li
Editor | Yang Xuan
36 Krypton learned from people familiar with the matter that Wang Yilun, the head of the intelligent driving AI algorithm of Lili Auto and the chief AI scientist, will resign in the near future. During the ideal period, Wang Yilun was mainly responsible for the research and development of AI algorithms such as intelligent driving perception and maps, and reported to Lang Xianpeng, vice president of ideal intelligent driving.
After resigning, Wang Yilun may participate in entrepreneurship, but is still in the state of job handover and is expected to leave at the end of the month. Insiders said that Ideal is looking for an algorithm VP to take over Wang Yilun’s work.
Wang Yilun graduated from Stanford University with a major in computer science, and joined Lili Auto in December 2020. At that time, Li Auto was in the stage of self-research of the algorithm. During his tenure, Wang Yilun’s perception algorithm team has hundreds of people. Earlier, Wang Yilun was a senior expert of Huawei’s car BU and chief AI architect of Kuan Stool Technology.
According to a source, Wang Yilun’s departure may be related to the pressure of internal research and development. Lixiang’s autonomous driving team is less than half of that of Xiaopeng, and CEO Li Xiang’s expansion pace is relatively conservative.
It is understood that the ideal autonomous driving team has about 700 people. Xpeng Motors has about 1,500 R&D personnel and data personnel for intelligent driving, and NIO’s autonomous driving business team has more than 1,000 people.
Regarding the above information, 36氪 asked Ideal Auto and Wang Yilun for verification respectively. Ideal denied Wang Yilun’s resignation. Wang Yilun himself expressed that it was inconvenient to respond.
Li Auto was founded in 2015, but the real self-development of its self-driving business started in late 2020. At the end of 2020, the Ideal ONE model, which was still using the supplier’s assisted driving solution, had several collisions with merging trucks. However, the supplier’s long system iteration time and software upgrade price make the ideal unacceptable. At this point, Li Auto has finally made up its mind to develop its own intelligent driving system.
At that time, there were only 60 people in the ideal car intelligent driving team, and Wang Yilun also joined under this background as the head of algorithm research and development. At the beginning of 2021, Ideal internally launched an intelligent driving project called “Acropolis”, and plans to develop an intelligent driving system within one year to defend the ideal.
In contrast, Xiaopeng Motors’ autonomous driving team will have reached 300 people in 2020, and in January 2021, the high-speed pilot assisted driving function NGP will be opened to users. The pressure of ideal car to catch up with friends can be imagined.
Li Xiang, CEO of Ideal Motors, once told 36氪: It is normal for everyone to work until 12 o’clock in the evening, especially the autonomous driving team, most of whom work on Saturdays and Sundays. The R&D team very much wants to deliver the work as soon as possible, and they really don’t want to use someone else’s algorithm. Wang Yilun also said in an interview that after joining the ideal car, work has almost become the whole of life. Under high-intensity overtime work, he gained 20 pounds in one year.
After a lot of hard work, the results really lived up to expectations. When the new car L9 is launched in June 2022, Lili has launched Lili AD Max, a self-developed intelligent driving system. According to Li Xiang, the perception, decision-making, planning and operating system LiOS in the software are all developed by Lixiang Auto. The system is not only equipped with lidar, intelligent driving high-level function NOA, but also opened the self-developed AEB (collision emergency braking) source code to the industry. Ideal to quickly tie the opponent.
However, the current ideal intelligent driving is more to make up for the shortcomings. In the field of higher technology, the ideal car has always been conservative. Taking L4-level autonomous driving as an example, Xiaopeng and NIO have begun to explore the Robotaxi (autonomous taxi) business or through self-build/cooperation. In contrast, the ideal car action is not much.
At present, the field of intelligence, including intelligent driving and chips, has become an important business proposition for car manufacturers. The process of team building and running-in is also more likely to cause competition for resources and turbulence in talent management. At the beginning of this year, Wang Kai, the CTO who was responsible for the intelligent research and development of Lili Auto, resigned; in the middle of the year, Xie Yan, the former vice president of Huawei software, joined Lili Auto to promote the implementation of self-developed chips.
After the product system and organizational structure of new car companies have gradually matured, how to continue to attract and retain talents is a problem that entrepreneurs need to think about for a long time.
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Related events
- Wang Yilun, head of the AI algorithm of Lili Auto, will resign 2022-10-25
- Li Xiang: Lixiang Auto has spent 3 years and tens of billions of investment to achieve full-stack self-development of core technologies2022-10-03
- Shen Yanan, President of Ideal Motors, sold 1 million shares in 5 days, cashing out over 90 million yuan 2022-09-13
- Lili Auto delivered 4,571 units in August 2022-09-01
- Li Auto’s revenue in the second quarter was 8.73 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 73.3% 2022-08-15
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