[simantel]

> It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be

Probably because it's just here now? More people take Waymo than Lyft each day in SF.

[imiric]

It's "here" if you live in a handful of cities around the world, and travel within specific areas in those cities.

Getting this tech deployed globally will take another decade or two, optimistically speaking.

[prettyblocks]

Given how well it seems to be going in those specific areas, it seems like it's more of a regulatory issue than a technological one.

[fragmede]

Most people live within a couple hours of a city though, and I think we'll see robot taxis in a majority of continents by 2035 though. The first couple cities and continents will take the longest, but after that it's just a money question, and rich people have a lot of money. The question then is: is the taxi cab consortium, which still holds a lot of power, despite Uber, in each city the in world, large enough to prevent Waymo from getting a hold, for every city in the world that Google has offices in.

[mlazos]

Yeah where they have every inch of SF mapped, and then still have human interventions. We were promised no more human drivers like 5-7 years ago at this point.

[zer00eyz]

Human interventions.

High speed connectivity and off vehicle processing for some tasks.

Density of locations to "idle" at.

There are a lot of things that make all these services work that means they can NOT scale.

These are all solvable but we have a compute problem that needs to be addressed before we get there, and I haven't seen any clues that there is anything in the pipeline to help out.

[stockresearcher]

The typical Lyft vehicle is a piece of junk worth less than $20k, while the typical Waymo vehicle is a pretend luxury car with $$$ of equipment tacked on.

Waymo needs to be proving 5-10x the number of daily rides as Lyft before we get excited

[wat10000]

I suspect most gig drivers don't fully account for the cost of running their car, so these services are also being effectively subsidized by their workers.

You can provide almost any service at a loss, for a while, with enough money. We shouldn't get excited until Waymo starts turning an actual profit.

[financypants]

Their cars cost waymo money

[joe_the_user]

Well, if we say these systems are here, it still took 10+ years between prototype and operational system.

And as I understand it; These are systems, not individual cars that are intelligent and just decide how to drive from immediate input, These system still require some number of human wranglers and worst-case drivers, there's a lot of specific-purpose code rather nothing-but-neural-network etc.

Which to say "AI"/neural nets are important technology that can achieve things but they can give an illusion of doing everything instantly by magic but they generally don't do that.