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It's great that Waymo has decided to start selling bits of their tech. That's in contrast to other Alphabet-developed hardware like TPU (for training, not inference). I wonder whether 'for selected partners only' is going to be temporary or permanent restriction.

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> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving — beginning with robotics, security, agricultural technology, and more — so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs.

It will likely come with licensing and non-compete agreements.

It would be as bad as lack of right to repair. If it happens , then I hope someone like Intel does the same to them.

I'm not sure TPU is a good example. That one is already super Google specific and difficult to externalize except through a hosted service. Google's internal infra is pretty complex.

It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow. Yes there may be some obstacles to using it to in your home pc, but there should be at least a paid way to use it if you want in your own server.

> It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow.

That's simply not true. If framework X supports <client that connects to complex hosted service Y> then "using it in my home PC" isn't automatically possible.

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