Meanwhile, General Motors’ investment in Carnegie Mellon University during the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge (and beyond) has been significant, but many of the most experienced CMU researchers went to Uber last year. With other big companies (like Google and Tesla) hiring roboticists like crazy, and most of the academic research centers already cleaned out, GM needed to do something, and that something was pay a ridiculous amount of money for three year old autonomous vehicle technology startup Cruise Automation.