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The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

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Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#61

Post by petra »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53
petra wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Google's existing strategy for self-driving cars isn't practical at a national level because of that extensive mapping requirement, and it possibly never will be. >> Google's sensor platform is the most expensive out there. >> Google has never tested in bad weather What about a self-driving cars as a service ? they can be the first to start a very profitable service that is limited in area and in weather even thou…

Sure, they could definitely do similarly to what Uber just announced, in a small scope area like the Bay Area suburbs. But that's not likely to be a high margin product, certainly not something Google would want to hang onto long term. It's far smarter to be selling software licenses or cloud access to millions of units built by other car manufacturers and operated by individuals or other companies at scale, that's w…

Even if Google decides to sell access to other companies, at scale, they can still say: "our service only works in summer , in that list of expanding areas". And of course if they sell access on a per-trip-basis, it's almost as if they own the service themselves.

>> What if people want to be taken just outside the service area?

Google is currently trying to be the comparison search engine for people who want to order rides - via their Google Maps. If they sucsseed, they'll just fit you with the right service according the limitations of the self-driving car ,etc.

And regarding Google Glass - IDK. Even Uber is marketed on a city-by-city basis,

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#62

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jakozaur wrote: post #33

Is not as bad as article suggests: https://www.solveforx.com/graduated/ It just operates on hype curve. GoogleX takes projects from "technological trigger" to "peak of inflated expectations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

"Graduation" doesn't mean success. It seems to just mean "it moved out of X", even though usually that's just to somewhere else in Google it makes no money and sells no products.

- Verify/Life Sciences is failing pretty hard and has failed to develop any actual products. https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/28/google-life-sciences-exo...

- Glass is an absolute failure. I own one, I loved mine. It's still a failure.

- Gcam went to... Google Research? It went from moonshot R&D to normal R&D. That's not success.

- Google Brain... went to Research as well. And really, it is likely just a rebranded version of whatever DeepMind was already doing when Google bought them.

- Project Tango went from Google's moonshot R&D to Motorola's R&D (ATAP) which Google kept ownership of. That's also not success.

Android Wear, Flux, and Project Insight (Indoor Maps) probably all count as actual successes for X, but that's about it.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#63

Post by jfoster »

obmelvin wrote: post #41
jfoster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is either already mapping roads through the sensors on their cars, or is only one software update away from doing so. Their mapping data will be a lot fresher than Google's.

Tesla cars don't have enough sensors to capture great data. It will require a lot more than a software update for then to record data on par with googles quality

They claim autopilot uses "cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and data."

I think even just the cameras alone would be valuable. It seems a Tesla has a better idea of what's going on around it than a human would, so these sensors should be at least close to sufficient for training an autonomous driving agent.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#65

Post by mathattack »

freyr wrote: post #26
mathattack wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - this is the VC model. Hitting 100-1000x results every once in a while, as opposed to lots of 3-10x results.

Yes, but eventually the VC needs to hit that 100x result. GoogleX has not. Heck, nothing's even really made it out the gate. The self-driving car is the project that seems to have the biggest potential impact, but the string of high-profile departures over the last year or two is worrisome. Also, the leader wearing Rollerblades to meetings seems far too much like a parody of "quirky tech visionary" for my comfort. Bu…

Yes. VCs who don't have the big return don't get to have a 2nd fund. :-) I'm bullish on self-driving cars. Even if their cars don't make it, I think the AI behind it will.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#66

Post by baccheion »

RealityVoid wrote: post #56
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirement of what you need to compare with that data though, is important. Tesla's cars are training off less detailed data, yes. But that also means they're designed to work with less data available. Google's cars require $150,000 worth of sensor hardware. Will that price go down, sure? But Tesla's will be even cheaper.

I think that in 10 years time, time of flight lidars will become ubiquitous, just as common as digital cameras are now. And this will usher a new revolution of interaction between reality and the digital world.

Teleportation, obviously.

.

.

.

Oh how sweet it would be

for it to be me

that's the one to reveal

in days before

the IPO of many of these

(and the main other 3)

that what the world

has been waiting for

is sitting with me--

with open arms--

desperately ready to be--

with you--

always.

.

.

.

Some say with wonder

other with haste

all that's to be said

but even in this case

where is it again

what makes it all

seem sudden

a change

leaving the world a part

tense at the seams

knowing even then

aside from the waves

crashing toward the bitter end

it was dealt

squarely

only pausing to be

as there it is again.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

> The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

Isn't the whole idea of a "moonshot", in this context, a project that has both a long window before any payoff, and a high risk of failure. So isn't this a very much "water is wet" story?

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#68

Post by kllrnohj »

jfoster wrote: post #27
kllrnohj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200M km of adaptive cruise control & lane assist on a highway is very different from 2.7M km of fully autonomous driving on city streets & highway.

Think of the data collection aspect of it, though. Tesla's driving AI will know what happens in the real world better than Google's driving AI does.

Not really, because by comparison Tesla cars are relatively blind. Google's cars are loaded up with all kinds of sensors collecting as much data as they can. And they have the advantage of driving back to the plant to hoover off the data with as fat a pipe as they want.

Tesla is far more limited in both what it's collecting and how it's collecting it as it needs to go over a cell signal. For example they are using a camera for a hefty part of the autopilot system. They obviously can't stream every frame of that camera up to their servers for deeper analysis. Besides being infeasible bandwidth requirements it would be an insane privacy violation of the owner.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#69

Post by kllrnohj »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #25
flexie wrote: post #16

I have been wondering if Google hasn't already lost the self driving race to Tesla. Google still drives a few test vehicles around and has totalled some 2.7 million km: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_self-driving_car Tesla has more than 100,000 model S driving around and in just 7 months their auto pilots have already surpassed the km driven by Google for the past 7 years by almost a factor 100 (roughly 200M…

It's not just going to be about straight miles driven, it's about the technology being focused on and what's possible with it. Both Tesla and comma.ai are focusing primarily on what the car can see and do with it's own sensors... Google's cars are only functional on roads excessively mapped far above the normal Google Maps level. Google's existing strategy for self-driving cars isn't practical at a national level bec…

> Google's cars are only functional on roads excessively mapped far above the normal Google Maps level.

Since this is a core part of your argument, I'm gonna go ahead and [citation needed]

I've not heard anything of the sort and I've seen Google's cars on all sorts of roads. Plenty of their talks have been about the cars detecting anomalous situations and reacting appropriately, as well.

Re: The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door

#70

Post by cageface »

oh_sigh wrote: post #43
cageface wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be true that it's harder now to make those kinds of leaps than it was in the 1970s though.

Evidence of this assertion?

It's a speculation, not an assertion. But it's a speculation many well-informed scientists have made in the last few years.

For example: http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/02/07/the-difficulty-...

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