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Yeah, I know, I worked at Waymo.

My point wasn’t that these systems will never work in some capacity - my point is that they’re taking a lot longer to roll out than people predicted, and that the internals of these systems aren’t end-to-end ML models - it’s ML-based perception feeding in to a lot of traditional robotics code, with ML models handling certain prediction tasks in certain spots.

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You clearly know more than me but it definitely looks like it all fit neatly into a 5-10 year timeline which imo is insane for something of this magnitude.

The common refrain in 2015 was that we were < 5 years away from having self-driving cars operating at scale without the need for a safety driver in most major cities in the US.

At this point we have a public robotaxi service in one suburban area and two robotaxi services operating under restricted domains in SF that are open to the public behind a waitlist. The cars have problems with rain, fog, or snow, and expanding to a new city still takes a ton of time. Having joined the industry after the hype of 5 years ago, the reality now is nowhere near the vision companies we’re selling back then.

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