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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#371

Post by hackernewds »

dweekly wrote: post #156
mcny wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber. yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.

When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs. Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.

$75m seems like small fish, because it's a really poor monetization $/user, and opportunity cost. Thousands of ideas could generate that at Google.

Counterexample, Google Brain didn't make much money, but they still invested in it and spit out Transformers.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#372

Post by hackernewds »

noah_buddy wrote: post #325
sebzim4500 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly.

Hello, antitrust litigation! Before my time, but what you have just described is what got Microsoft in big trouble in the ‘90s.

Google photos? Google drive? Google Fi?

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#373

Post by jfoster »

STRiDEX wrote: post #242
jfoster wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)

airport terminal maps and regulations for every major airport in the united states

That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber.

Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#374

Post by jfoster »

somsak2 wrote: post #328
jfoster wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)

route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/

Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#375

Post by jfoster »

notatoad wrote: post #279
jfoster wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has to spend it, though. Uber seem in even less of a position to be footing that bill.

but if uber spend a couple billion on cars, and lyft spend a couple billion, and didi spends a couple billion, etc, that's a lot more spend than if only waymo spends it.

From Waymo's perspective it is certainly desirable to have someone else paying for the cars.

The problem is that when others spend on it, Waymo has more leverage over them if the cars are only going to work with the Waymo driver. Perfect vendor lock-in on assets worth $150k each.

What's in it for Uber? Perhaps just a more favorable & longer term deal, but if so, they're essentially handing over the future of their business to Waymo.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#376

Post by TaylorAlexander »

londons_explore wrote: post #357
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly. Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor. And th…

As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is very much a “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” kind of technology. People can promise anything about AI, because when it works it feels like magic. But it’s not magic, and we can’t expect every goal to be met just because someone is using AI. Nobody knows what challenges lie ahead for an end to end self driving system precisely because no one has done it. And it should be noted that with their “hydra net” architecture it is relatively end to end but it is not a single large network, but an engineered assortment of many small networks. Quite a lot of human choice goes in to decisions around how to design that, and this also leads to edge cases. But even more general systems like GPT-4 suffer from issues with edge cases.

We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. Human eyes and the human brain are so much more advanced than a computer and cameras, it may not follow that “images are all you need”.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#377

Post by TaylorAlexander »

threeseed wrote: post #358
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.

> They’ll get there eventually Debatable. So many of their issues are to do with the lack of LiDAR sensors.

True, true. We may see a change of heart for them if solid state LiDAR ever actually hits the market, but last I checked Velodyne/Ouster keep announcing things and then letting them disappear. I did see them saying they have samples available for 2025 model years cars so perhaps Tesla could be testing with that now. I don’t see them deploying mechanical LiDAR but solid state is similar enough to a camera they may do it.

Edit: then again for such a critical component Tesla might want to make their own solid state LiDAR, or at least license someone’s technology so they can produce them on their own terms.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#378

Post by osigurdson »

yard2010 wrote: post #53
osigurdson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the HTR (hard to replicate) tech is FSD. Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend.

They couldn't bang out a social network over the last decade(s), I hardly believe they could bang out anything than keep extracting more money from the dying ad industry

Very different. Social networks value derives from network effect - every additional user adds additional value to the ecosystem. Google simply started too late.

Taxis compete on price, safety, quality of service. Virtually all of this value derives from the quality of the FSD implementation. Of course, this will extend to all forms of road transportation eventually. It is going to very much be a winner takes all situation for a number of years (perhaps a decade). The next phase will be a period of high fragmentation as the technology becomes commoditized and a race to the bottom will ensue. The final phase will be consolidation with a few players being best at execution, cost control and finance operations.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#379

Post by Gunnerhead »

spiderice wrote: post #135
shmatt wrote: post #46

The whole arguing with your Uber Eats driver was bad "please come to the door", "no, please come outside", "i can't leave my baby, please come to the door", "i can't leave my car next to a hydrant, please come outside" Now it's going to be a lot more interesting

I’m guessing this is a big city problem? I’ve never once experienced this

Neither have I in NYC.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#380

Post by zild3d »

yalogin wrote: post #89

I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In…

>What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable

What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)

Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table

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