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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

#391

Post by ra7 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #383
threeseed wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Using LiDAR means you are actually saving on compute resources since you're now getting direct distance measurements instead of inferring using ML.

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

#392

Post by mensetmanusman »

ra7 wrote: post #391
mensetmanusman wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Using LiDAR means you are actually saving on compute resources since you're now getting direct distance measurements instead of inferring using ML.

Lidar only works to a certain subset of distances, so you need cameras anyway to infer long distances beyond the scope. Also, since distance alone isn’t sufficient, you need cameras anyway for inference of other things.

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

#393

Post by mensetmanusman »

threeseed wrote: post #390
mensetmanusman wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LiDAR also has FoV issues and is sensitive to lens debris among other things. Also, the addition of another layer of high resolution data may make it impractical for the compute power requirement to synthesize it all.

Everyone except Tesla uses LiDAR. So any compute issues are not preventing adoption.

Compute for full self driving hasn’t been solved, I hope it is, and I don’t know which strategy will work. It’s entirely possible LiDaR makes it work better but requires more GPUs on vehicle :)

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

#394

Post by ra7 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #392
ra7 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using LiDAR means you are actually saving on compute resources since you're now getting direct distance measurements instead of inferring using ML.

Lidar only works to a certain subset of distances, so you need cameras anyway to infer long distances beyond the scope. Also, since distance alone isn’t sufficient, you need cameras anyway for inference of other things.

Lidar works up to 300 meters. That’s plenty for highway driving. Everyone using lidar also use multiple cameras so they are getting best of both worlds (using sensor fusion).

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

#395

Post by boh »

bertil wrote: post #300
boh wrote: post #134

One thing that hasn't been addressed, given the limited test markets, is whether autonomous taxis actually will actually be popular and preferable among consumers. Theoretically having a car that drives itself seems like a great product/service, in practice it's more clunky and awkward than you would hope. From the experiences I've had, a human driver is undoubtedly the better option. Many things happen on the road w…

This is very true, but it sounds to me like a classic case of design iterations: find patterns, develop them among users, learn ways to introduce new users… A search engine, an email, chat… non of that was natural, and the first iterations where clunky, but you know can’t imagine they’d be any simpler or that anyone would want anything else.

So if we look exclusively at only successful software products for our comparison, we'll see success for a completely different product category with high capital costs--got it.

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

#396

Post by nashashmi »

kibwen wrote: post #163
nashashmi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate

There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business.

That would be an anti trust problem.

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

#397

Post by anthlax »

hanniabu wrote: post #356
bertil wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.

If I were Uber I would structure this as "we'll integrate waymo as a trial and if it's successful then we'll acquire waymo after x period of time"

Google will absolutely not sell Waymo after such an incredibly steep investment.

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

#398

Post by trophycase »

mbesto wrote: post #17
SilverBirch wrote: post #2

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, a…

> The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Uber can't be profitable without autonomous vehicles, so the answer IMHO here is simple. For Alphabet, the answer is similarly simple - they'll partner with literally anyone to get distribution.

They can be and very soon will be. Just look at their financials.

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

#399

Post by cloudwalking »

wg0 wrote: post #81

At the moment - self driving technology is as good as LLMs are. When they work, they work wonderfully and when they don't, they don't but the problem is that there's no sure shot way of knowing when they'll work and when they won't. Isn't it or something has changed lately?

This is actually not true at all. At Waymo we have a very good understanding of our behavior.
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