Lol, of course they said that as their entire investment strategy is to throw more dumb money at startups than anyone else can possibly match. Their vision fund VC has been investing $100 billion dollars and they're planning on doing another $100 billion dollar fund. "To put the fund’s magnitude in perspective, its size is almost double the investments made by U.S. venture firms last year. PitchBook data shows that VC fundraising in the U.S. totaled $53.9 billion last year across more than 200 funds, and that was the largest annual raise in at least a decade." [0]
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/softbanks-100-billion-vision...
I think the engineers have been probably been wildly optimistic as usual, and the last 5% of car autonomy is going to take as much effort as the first 95%, or maybe double that.
But you know the sort of people who are wildly optimistic and prone to over-exaggeration. Executives like Musk.
Most are optimistic about highway driving in California though.
This may not be true if there is still a fundamental leap to be made
Rather hundreds or thousands of small leaps. For example solving problems like this:
The Munich-based AID team will become Argo’s European headquarters, a move that will expand its staff 40% to more than 700 employees."
AID has been Audi's L4/L5 development arm, which was separate from VW's main research arm. It also helps to judge the size of this deal, because VW only seems to invest one billion in capital and the remaining 1.6 billion investment is AID. It would be interesting to know, how they came up with that valuation ...
Listen to them more. What else do you expect fund managers to say?
We will not see any real self driving in our generation, and may be not even after. That is much more for practical consideration than that of technical possibility.
Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads
I think we can once we build purposeful infrastructure (think cars "on rails" with mesh-coordinated intersections).
> Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads
Argo, although lesser known (but still out of early Waymo and CMU's Robotics Institute), is every bit as competitive as the other major players. If anything, they are less bombastic than the Elon Musks of the world falsely tweeting that we would all be taking naps in our cars by last year.
In that way, surely, but you will need to build a purpose built road network for that. Some self driving buses in China work like that.
New, growing cities with centralised planning can afford that, others not so much.
I agree.
But we'll be driven a large percent of trips, in the near future.
There's on-demand shared(few people in a vehicle) riding - which can be quite cheap AND fast. ridewithvia.com seem to scale with that model pretty fast. A combination of that with strong public transport systems and regulations may beat cars.
But also, a combination of partial self-driving(highway, etc), with remote control driving, could work.