Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…
I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real d…
The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem. Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.
Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
Sure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…
the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
So you hope the people keeping you safe continue to put themselves in danger for you. Got it.
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some…
What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero. That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
But Waymo or their competitors are not in the "shuttling people around" business. They're developing a driver. Robotaxi is one of the applications.
The winner-takes-all aspect comes from economies of scale for example. If Waymo is several years ahead and has better economics, how can Cruise catch up? They will have lower cost of capital. Top people will want to work at Waymo rather than Cruise. It will be hard to close the R&D gap. When Cruise is where Waymo is today, Waymo will already have a lightweight package that will be used by Ford, VW or Toyota and capable to drive everywhere in any weather conditions.
Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now… Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.
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> lol ok whatever Waymo's says is gospel and everything Tesla says is suspect, EDS in action. Get help.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
> lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
A year? They'll be gone in two weeks!
Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens." Nice dig at Tesla.
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
A system for personally owned vehicles has been on the roadmap for a long time.
lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
> lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year. A year? They'll be gone in two weeks! Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.