There's a raging talent war for AI experts and its costing automakers millions

The self-driving car space is getting increasingly more cutthroat. The sheer number of lawsuits filed recently are a testament to that. Tesla, for example, is suing its former Autopilot director Sterling Anderson. The lawsuit claims Anderson stole data for a competing venture, Aurora Innovations, that hasn't even come out of stealth mode yet. "In their zeal to play catch-up, traditional automakers have created a get-rich-quick environment. Small teams of programmers with little more than demoware have been bought for as much as a billion dollars. Cruise Automation, a 40-person firm, was purchased by General Motors in July 2016 for nearly $1 billion. In August 2016, Uber acquired Otto, another self-driving startup that had been founded only seven months earlier, in a deal worth more than $680 million."