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Comment by JLO64 | Hacker News Reader

> But we still have no self driving cars

While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.

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A better formulation would be: we don't know if we have self-driving cars.

Because if it became fashionable for pedestrians to wear large green dresses with red balls, and everybody would wear that, we have no idea what the AI would do.

It would work fine. seriously what are you on about?

This is a general point rather than an argument supporting the GP comment, but it can be shockingly hard to know what the correct response to particular situations is, or predict how a system will respond. For example, one system I know had difficulty differentiating people laying on the road from unmapped speedbumps (particularly at night), but was very good at recognizing them standing up. Someone spent a lot of time testing with dummies until perception improved. Another had no idea how to handle people in fursuits and halloween costumes, because it was incorrectly applying animal behavioral models to pedestrians.

That's why the latest self-driving systems include reasoning models that draw from the massive amount of knowledge embedded in LLMs. Language evolved to communicate things that are not here and now after all.

We still have no general self driving cars. What we have is a bunch of geofenced tests. While we are closer than ever, we are still seemingly a long way away from truck drivers being obsolete was foretold over 10 years ago now.

“General” would mean winter driving and I’m not aware of any large-scale tests of things like icy conditions on hills.

Edit: nevermind. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/waymo-toronto-winter-self-d...

Waymo has been winter driving in Tahoe since 2016 or so. Hard to find icier conditions with bigger hills.

TIL, thanks. That’s heartening to hear as I live in one of those places, or I used to?? The last winter was scary mild.

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