IN MARCH Starsky Robotics, a self-driving lorry firm based in San Francisco, closed down. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, its founder, gave several reasons for its failure. Investors' interest was already cooling, owing to a run of poorly performing tech-sector IPOs and a recession in the trucking business. His firm's focus on safety, he wrote, did not go down well with impatient funders, who preferred to see a steady stream of whizzy new features. But the biggest problem was that the technology was simply not up to the job.

Roundup Let's get cracking with some machine-learning news. Starksy Robotics is no more: Self-driving truck startup Starsky Robotics has shut down after running out of money and failing to raise more funds. CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher bid a touching farewell to his upstart, founded in 2016, in a Medium post this month. He was upfront and honest about why Starsky failed: "Supervised machine learning doesn't live up to the hype," he declared. Neural networks only learn to pick up on certain patterns after they are faced with millions of training examples.

A Starsky truck, combining sensors and self-driving tech and remote operation, does a test run in Florida. When it comes to self-driving trucks, trucks that can tool down the highway without a human behind the wheel, the common perception is that this is a very complex technological problem. It is thought that solving the artificial intelligence problem, computer-based intelligence that can navigate roads as safely or more safely than a human, is a particularly hard nut to crack. Several pundits argue this technology is still probably ten years away. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, the CEO of Starsky Robotics, begs to differ.

Two days after Uber announced self-driving truck operations in Arizona, which feature a backup driver as a precaution, Starsky Robotics said it has completed a seven-mile drive without a human in the vehicle. In mid-February, Starsky conducted the test on a closed portion of Route 833 in Hendry County, Florida, with no traffic. The 20,000-pound unmanned robotic truck drove 35 mph during the run. Starsky is the first company to publicly test an empty cabin for autonomous trucks. Its aim is to make a delivery without a human present by year's end.

On Tuesday, ride-hailing giant Uber announced it was doing a very cool, techno-futuristic thing: starting a commercial delivery service that included letting a truck drive itself 344 miles across Arizona. Of course, a trained safety operator sat behind the wheel the whole time, ready to take over if anything went awry. Pshaw, says a small startup called Starsky Robotics. In true Florida Man fashion, founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher decided to do something much bolder and a bit scarier: In mid-February, in the Sunshine State (where regulations are as lax as those in Arizona), he sent his truck down the road for a 7-mile journey--with nobody inside. Now Starsky expects to start making completely driverless deliveries in Florida by the end of 2018, with at least one truck. Taken together, these two demos offer diverging futures of freight, in which humans play different roles.

Starsky Robotics is retrofitting large trucks to make them driverless. By the end of the year, the startup hopes it'll be able to operate a truck without a person physically sitting in the vehicle. Starsky Robotics is retrofitting large trucks to make them driverless. By the end of the year, the startup hopes it'll be able to operate a truck without a person physically sitting in the vehicle. Driverless cars could transform the way our country moves, potentially making roads more efficient and possibly saving lives because of fewer traffic accidents.