Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars | Hacker News Reader

Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

jalopnik.com

12 pointsheshiebee6 comments

Original source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-...

Wasted, it depends on the point of view. Self driving was a good story, costed 2.5B but attracted multiple time this amount in investors money, so it ends up being a good strategy.

Are anyone elses autonomous cars really close to release?

Waymo has been signalling the imminent arrival of autonomous taxis for a long time but seem to be stuck on something, never taking the last step to being a proper open service. Telsa have been claiming FSD is just round the corner for years, but seem to have gone quite on that recently.

I'd love to know what the sticking points are, especially for waymo, who.must have many millions of miles of driving experience but seem reluctant to commit.

>I'd love to know what the sticking points are

probably the long tail of unique problems that any autonomous system in an open environment faces.

It's kind of the crux of all these ML learning based systems. By definition you can't learn what's totally new and absent from data, but that is precisely where the intelligence lies when it comes to human drivers. Which is why I think genuine self-driving without fancy geofencing or whatever is almost an AI-hard problem.

I live in Bath, an old-ish European city. It's dense, with narrow roads, many awkward junctions, and lots of onstreet parking that makes many roads one lane in places. I've often thought that FSD was basically impossible here without cracking general AI and some theory of mind just to tackle relatively simple cases of trying to negotiate with oncoming traffic in pinch points. But I'd always assumed that places like phoenix would be so much easier. It's interesting to see that even places like that are throwing up enough problematic situations that Waymo still don't feel confident launching.

Maybe because Uber is just not a software company. We should stop sugar-coating that. That's my opinion.

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