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Comment by Powdering7082 | Hacker News Reader

Waymo seems to be a counter example here

Waymo took 15 years and $30B to develop and is still unprofitable. By the time they make their money back it'll probably be too late.

They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.

There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.

Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.

    > They’ll never make their money back.

I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds.

    > Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.

I disagree here. To be clear, when we talk about AI/ML here, I separate it into a few parts: (1) the code that does training, (2) the training data, (3) the resulting model weights, (4) the code that does the inference. As I understand, self driving uses a lot of inference. (Not an expert, but please correct me if wrong.)

How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)

You point out yourself that Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on training data. And the trained model is software, of which the price-to-use trends towards epsilon, even when it’s very expensive to make. For example Google search, maps, docs, YouTube. An exception is Netflix, but there the value provided by a subscription is access to novelty, which is not intrinsic to driving software.

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