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Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

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Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#51

Post by georgeglue1 »

MarkMc wrote: post #50
tuna-piano wrote: post #7

I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far…

> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. That's true of software generally, but not will not be true of automated driving software. Windows, iOS, Facebook and YouTube have strong network effects. Google search and Microsoft Office offer a familiar user interface and superior features. Self driving software will have none of these benefits - there is no network effect, no significant user interface, and…

There are massive economies of scale. If Google is first to mass market, they will have a large information lead. From there, their cars could take better routes and handle more edge cases.

There's a similar network effect and economy of scale that applies to Waze + Google Maps' lead in mapping.

Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#52

Post by visarga »

robotresearcher wrote: post #13
siddarthd2919 wrote: post #5

It is not really that much! 1.1 B in 6 years on a moonshot project.

It's a lot if it doesn't pay off eventually.

The same tech that is being used in self driving cars could be repurposed for autonomous robots, and end up with a market much bigger than that of transportation. SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots.

Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#56

Post by ballenf »

MarkMc wrote: post #50
tuna-piano wrote: post #7

I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far…

> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. That's true of software generally, but not will not be true of automated driving software. Windows, iOS, Facebook and YouTube have strong network effects. Google search and Microsoft Office offer a familiar user interface and superior features. Self driving software will have none of these benefits - there is no network effect, no significant user interface, and…

Agree for the most part, but question the lack of network effects here:

Is there not a potential interoperability / safety gain if all the cars on the road know how all the others will react? In a game of chicken they know they should each veer right to avoid an accident, so to speak.

I guess the answer depends to some degree on just how much inter-car communication is part of the future and whether those will be fully standardized. And even if standardized whether additional proprietary communications will be permitted between the same species.

Finally, isn't there a race on to collect as much detailed driving data as possible to train these systems? So the more a system is deployed the faster it will improve and therefore be more attractive?

I guess my question is really whether meeting minimum safety standards is going to be the sole question that purchasers of self-driving tech ask before buying. It's not too hard to fathom different techs being a "smoother" drive or maybe even able to handle more side roads (and thus more shortcut options) that other techs aren't ready for yet.

Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#57

Post by Animats »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #10
tuna-piano wrote: post #7

I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far…

How do you come to that first conclusion? It seems difficult to tell who is the “furthest ahead” because it’s a pretty complex race. For starters, we can’t even say with certainty who all of the competitors are. Some are very quiet or at early stages but could be working on a breakthrough problem that turns out to be a pivot point. Some are specializing. Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid…

Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar?

Probably some big auto parts company. Continental [1] and Denso [2] are both building solid state LIDARs. Quanergy seems to be all hype.

Maybe automatic driving is just going to be a set of components Tier I auto parts makers sell to auto companies. That's how ABS braking and stability control works. Those are the companies that can make electronics work reliably in the automotive environment.

It may not be a race, either. Many major auto manufacturers expect to ship some form of automated driving in the 2020-2021 model year. There's no reason to expect one big winner here.

As for "transportation as a service", Avis, the car rental company, is getting ready to do that. They're servicing Google's self-driving test fleet in Austin, so they'll be ready to go into that business when the time comes.

[1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-biggest-supplier-to-tak...

Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#59

Post by deepnotderp »

throwa321 wrote: post #44
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent example is a 2014 article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... Consider that at the time, an engineer told him that the car was dependent on a level of mapping detail that was impractical at a nationwide level, that the car would run a red light if it wasn't on the car's map. The article also cites that the cars would have issues in bright sunlight, particularly deter…

Yes, but computer vision has moved forward by leaps and bounds since 2014, and so have GPUs. AD pipelines uses object-detection for traffic-sign detection. RCNN was state of the art for this back then and ran at what 0.2 fps and ~40 mAP ? SSD came out in 2016 and ran at 60+ fps at ~80 mAP. Google's mobilenets implementation probably runs atleast twice as fast and apparently has no noticeable loss in accuracy.

There are more performant and more efficient network architectures than mobilenets. Don't get me wrong, Google's DL research is good, but it's not significantly ahead of field SOTA like they would have you believe.

Re: Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

#60

Post by adrianN »

MarkMc wrote: post #50
tuna-piano wrote: post #7

I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far…

> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. That's true of software generally, but not will not be true of automated driving software. Windows, iOS, Facebook and YouTube have strong network effects. Google search and Microsoft Office offer a familiar user interface and superior features. Self driving software will have none of these benefits - there is no network effect, no significant user interface, and…

That is, if somebody figures out how to make good autocars without absolutely massive amounts of training data. For now it looks like whoever gets their software out in world first will have a huge advantage just because they get much more telemetry than the competition.
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