This thread is almost as old as my daughter:
The money quote:
- To get there, though, what we need is a much smarter AI, a kind that can reason, and not hallucinate, grounded in reality and not just corpus statistics
Kind of reminds me of when Airbus said that they're working on a fully electric jumbo jet and all they need to get there is some cheap, robust room temperature superconducting batteries.
I didn't know about the whole 'Waymo requires manual rules per road' thing, that is wild. Really puts a nail in the coffin that Google's "we simply scan the entire world and the car will have enough information to drive" is a formula that after a decade plus they just can't make work.
At least it's good to see one obviously risk-taking company put in its place with Cruise's pullback. Hopefully it's only a matter of time before Tesla goes the same way with their even-riskier approach to non-highway automation because that stuff is not, will never be safe enough because of their tech.
Every map in Google's arsenal is hand-tuned. My wife got in the habit of hand-tuning their maps for them whenever she had to deliver a baby up in the canyons north of LA - Google has no idea where anything is and their data set is too small. Fortunately the world still has the patience to go "hey Google your idea of this address is completely fucking whack." I taught my cousin to do that because UPS could find his house but OnTrak and Fedex couldn't - UPS, I believe, has their own annotated Trimble database while OnTrak and Fedex just let their contractor drivers figure it out on their own. Tune the Google database, get your packages, ignore the Google database, hope your shipper uses UPS.
It's precisely the approach Google has always had: "give me an accurate map and a stopwatch and I'll fly the alps blind." Google isn't an innovation company, they're a data company. They stand to benefit more from curating mapsets that they then lease to B2B partners like Uber and Amazon - if Google spends $1 a year mapping the bejeesus out of my street and earns 25 cents a year leasing access to that map to UPS, Fedex, USPS, Amazon and DoorDash, they're profitable without ever having to solve anything. I think if you look at Waymo as a technology demonstrator for third party integration you're there - Chrome isn't a browser, it's an advertising and tracking pipeline available to businesses.
This is why Tesla is fucking doomed - Musk thinks the consumer is the product and the consumer is a thrill-seeking asshole who wants to watch Yu-Gi-Oh while telling his car to get him to work at 7mph over the speed limit and also, let's go get a latte. Amazon wants to eliminate employees and lower its margins, Chad McChoad wants a fucking butler but can't afford one. You sell to Amazon via licensing terms, you sell to Chad with a flamethrower company.