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I don't have a strong opinion on Zoox, this CEO, or even this story, but there sure does seem to be a lot of frustration in the self-driving world. Leaves me with two thoughts:

* There's a lot more runway for these bike sharing startups then I thought there'd be.

* Self driving is hard.

(^^ Copied from a duped post)

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* There's limits to current AI/ML technology that create a hard ceiling and extends timelines long beyond the current hype cycle and nobody wants to admit it or else funding might stop coming in.

Exactly this. The hype was all in the prototyping phase of the technology, going as far as you can get to make a demo and impress some investors. Progress looked like it was happening quickly because a controlled demo could be made with existing technology.

Now that it's time to build full production systems the hardest problems and edge cases need to be addressed, which could be ignored for demo systems, and the solutions aren't available without some new research developments.

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