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Having 5+ companies each pouring billions into trying to make this technology a reality separately is ridiculous. All these companies should come together and work on a standardized single solution that can be shared between them. It will come much faster and be less expensive if they are pooling their resources.

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Everyone here worships at the temple of competition

But what if they standardized on some compromise, as they tend to? That alone would set progress back, not foreward. Think if there are multiple orgs with billions to throw at it, the more the merrier. If there were just a few with a few million each, your plan makes much better sense. At some point the beuracracy of collectivism overshadows its usefulness.

I dare you to name a good technology that came about due to a race of proprietary competition and not in close collaboration with the best talent in the field. It really is a waste to bin all this engineering talent apart just because their free backpacks have a different logo embroidered. You could have two engineers struggling with the exact same problem sitting in the same uber pool ride to work and they wouldn't be able to speak a word of it to each other due to shortsightedness by shareholders. There will be a point where a clear winner emerges, 5 competing companies turns to 3 and turns to 1, and all those hours and hours of engineering effort by the failures becomes a moot point. It's not like the 1 company that emerges will hire another 5 companies worth of engineering either, this is redundant work. You wouldn't even be able to learn from these failures until decades after the fact in a blog post from a retired engineer no longer bound to an NDA.

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