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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if self-driving succeeds then there won't be enough gig-drivers ready-to-go to cover a self-driving outage.

Taxis, available with e.g. a simple phone call, have existed since before telephones and cars really, and they still exist now even as ride-sharing has taken over. They will exist as Cruise rises.

They exist because they're a viable business because there is enough approximately consistent demand. That's not guaranteed to continue.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#382
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise is interesting insofar as they are not simply looking to sell their technology, but they also want to monetize it as a service. Not only will they not need a driver, they will also be able to buy the hardware (the car) at cost. If it's successful, their margins will be much higher than Uber and Lyft by a long shot.

As a taxpayer who pays for roads, and suffers from traffic congestion caused by one-occupant and zero-occupant vehicles, I'm eagerly looking forward to reducing the taxes I pay, by taxing those margins, instead. Ideally, the taxes could be high enough that driverless taxis will operate at barely above break-even. The financial comfort of me and my neighbours are more important to me than the profit margins of a firm…

My cynical take: the government is not going to forgo collecting a tax from you that you are already paying. Instead it will tax you and start collecting per-ride fees from Cruise, etc.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#383
post #283

I have 3 thoughts: (1) Amazing to see progress, lets make self driving cars a reality! (2) Oh, its another limited private beta like Waymo has been doing. I'd like to actually use these, and this doesn't seem that much closer. (3) What the heck does Cruise's cap table look like anymore? Acquired by GM, then almost immediately spun back out?

Parent organization is still General Motors, they just operate independently

There must be a little more to this, since clearly they are not a wholly owned subsidiary.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#384

I’m concerned about the timing of this. Former CEO Dan Ammann, fired in December, was a big champion of the robotaxi business model. It is speculated he was fired because GM CEO Mary Barra disagrees with this strategy and wants them to focus more on integration with existing GM vehicles. I am afraid that the robotaxi timeline was pulled in so that the rest of the believers inside Cruise can get supporting data to pro…

I wouldn't read too much into firings at Cruise. Working there was like a company-sized game of "The Weakest Link". Anyone worth their salt gets fired eventually, it's just the way they operate.

Super cool comment. Got any proof or evidence or anything?

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#387
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's surprising. I've driven San Francisco as an Uber/Lyft driver and it's a nightmare. I'm really curious how it checks for side traffic when it's nose is pointed at the sky at a stop sign on a steep hill.

It might actually do a lot better than you and I. Remember, it's equipped with radar so it can probably see cars the next block over.

radar doesn't see around corners. At any rate, would have to see some evidence that it can handle the worst of The City before I took a ride, like the incessant construction, steel plates on the road covering new holes, taped off lane changes, resulting traffic jams where merging is happening and so on. It's a really difficult environment for a human and I've never heard the claim yet that self-driving was better than humans.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is success? Does 50 miles of geofenced and daily mapped streets mean Cruise won self driving? What if Waymo gets to 20k miles of geofenced roads and monthly mapped? What if Tesla gets to the point of one intervention/crash every 100k miles? 10M Miles?

Success? Go from point A to point B with minimal incidents. It's not that complicated as most people make out of it.

More importantly, "driverless" means no one at the driver seat. What Tesla has is barely even Level 3. Waymo right now is doing rides without anyone in the driverseat, aka Level 4.

What Tesla is doing is not driverless.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't read too much into firings at Cruise. Working there was like a company-sized game of "The Weakest Link". Anyone worth their salt gets fired eventually, it's just the way they operate.

Super cool comment. Got any proof or evidence or anything?

Just read through the negative reviews on Glassdoor. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Cruise-Reviews-E977351.htm “Churn” is not an uncommon word.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#390
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the ML threshold is crossed If, not when. Even the most cutting edge research today still pales in comparison to LiDAR.

Is it really an "if"? I think it would be pretty safe bet that in 100 years human-quality CV object detection will be solved (note, we both know that it is possible AND this doesn't require AGI). So then it's really a question of when (presumably you don't need the full 100 years).

As an amateur (non-AI-expert) it seems to me that behind every corner is lurking a sub-problem that is AGI-equivalent. I don't see any reason to believe that humans do human-quality object detection without also deploying tremendous contextual understanding of the world. So perhaps it will turn out that a computer needs something similar?
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