SoftBank Will Invest $2.25B in Cruise
fortune.com
fortune.com
Pretty impressed with GM for having the insight to understand that arrangement was best and the flexibility to pull it off. And incredibly impressed with what Kyle and his team have achieved post-acquisition. They clearly remain as hungry to make this happen as on day 1.
honestly, it was 100% luck GM took notice of them. weren't many other alternatives around at that time. GM buying them spurred the explosion of self-proclaimed software/full stack self driving startups we see today.
So Im not as impressed with the achievements so far as I am with the absolute dumb luck these guys have had. Kudos, i guess.
Previous examples are this account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tmpnam1234567
and this user _Fricken: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=_Fricken, who based on choice of username seems to actually be impersonating the submitter of this thread.
As to the validity of the criticism I have no idea, but it strikes me as very odd.
edit: Fricken (no underscore) didn't actually submit this, but submitted the same article and is here in the comments.
We've banned all the trolling accounts we know about and their main account as well.
I think it's a lowball estimate, but for argument sake, let's say they're each worth $150k. At that price $2.25 billion will get you 15,000 robotaxis, and that's far from the only expense.
Waymo has announced a plan to deploy 20,000 vehicles in 2020, and that is what GM is up against.
You just can't have enough money in the bank if you're comitted to a scaled commercial robotaxi deployment and are planning for world domination.
in 2 years from 1B->4.5B (with GM original stake of 1B growing 2.5x during those 2 years(4.5 - 1.1 - 0.9 = 2.5)). This is why i love tech. We call it "only" here.
Not because I think they'd be good at it, but more for the fact that this would give Germany a real chance for a seat at the table of future tech-giants.
NVidia has a self-driving software stack that they can drop into a 3D sim. Same stack works in the sim (ie real world has a real camera, sim world has a sim camera, real world has a real lidar, sim world has a sim lidar...) They will drive billions of sim miles with their stack.
Hour 1 Minute 58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95nphvtVf34
Would be curious on accidents? Wish Waymo would share?
The seismic shift in marketing will be fascinating. From the freedom evoked by taking hairpin curves with the wind tossing your hair about. To a focus on the hardships and hidden costs of car ownership.
As passenger attention shifts from watching the road and scenery. To focusing on windowpane display screens. Expect to see branded partnerships with Disney / Netflix. As well as content specifically formulated to entertain or shop during the 20 minute car trip ;)
Why would it shift from scenery? Not having to watch the road means you're free to take in the views. That same classic PCH car shot can be done while looking to the ocean instead of straight ahead.
I’m sure this won’t be popular on HN. The Uber crash gave some insight on the real state of things. Tesla is in full PR mode even getting banned from the recent crash’s investigation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06976
From the abstract: "Until these problems are solved, human beings will remain an integral part of the driving task, monitoring the AI system as it performs anywhere from just over 0% to just under 100% of the driving".
Now there's room to be optimistic or pessimistic about how much an AI can help, but the academic consensus is that level five will need many more research breakthroughs. There are some good video lectures that give an overview of the field (but not that much depth) here:
And not just any humans, for that matter: humans over a certain age who are trained and licensed.
A seven-year-old human is smarter than any AI and has better knowledge about the world, yet we don't let them drive.
Waymo is clearly the leader and making great strides, but they're not there yet. By the end of this year when they officially launch to the public in Phoenix we'll have a much better idea of how far along they really are.
Edit:
also articles like this: https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/13/driverless-google-car...
I think it's not considered "level 4" because of specific state exemption and the speed limit.
A lot of people already die everyday in car accidents. The only difference will be that we have no one we can blame if the vehicle in question does not have a driver.
Yeah, it's like dogs digging on paved roads -- your millions of years of experience don't apply to when the technology changes.
Yeah, we've had cars and fast moving transportation for about that long.
I'm pretty sure, though, that the autonomous vehicle collisions that have made the news lately haven't been at "highway" speed and that that's true of most fatalities (possibly because most vehicle miles traveled are in dense cities?).
Now, that isn't to say that we've ever had 45mph or even 25mph heavy objects constantly moving around us in our evolutonary past, either, but the occasional fast predator wasn't unheard-of and a particularly fast one survives today.
Moreover, the typical difference in speed between (unpredictable) objects in traffic is much closer to human walking or running speeds.
We get into trouble when there's simply too many of them or the difference in speed gets too high.
It has saddened me that we've traditionally started from a position of human exceptionalism when studying other animals and, to a large extent, still do so today, despite discoveries such as tool manufacture by the New Caledonian crow and dolphin whistles following Zipf's law. I can only imagine how shocked (shocked!) we would be by cephalopod capabilities compared to humans if we were to, say, genetically modify them to live as long as a macaw.
All that said, my point is that I don't think there's anything particularly special in human evolution to suggest that we would have more skill at lookahead. One might even speculate that we would have less than an animal that has to chase at relatively high speed in order to survive, such as a cheetah or wolf [2].
As for tool use, I do admit that, though we're not unique in that regard, it's probably still safe to say it's rare enough to be remarkable. Perhaps if we hadn't been running around for so long assuming our uniqueness, someone might have tried teaching a corvid or octopus to drive by now.
[1] including such things as engineering trade-offs in areas like suspension where one might sacrifice pure performance (and therefore, arguably, control and subsequently safety) for comfort
[2] which are, of course, not domestic dogs. Thousands of years of human breeding may well have removed any evolutionary advantage related to driving.
There should be some sensible kind of road test, but it'd be a terrible outcome for regulators to specify exactly how the technology should work for a given model year.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/17412908/waymo-chrysler-p...
It sounds like they're serious business, but I don't want to dilute a bet on self-driving cars with a bet on consumer trucks.