Comment by choppaface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choppaface | Hacker News Reader

All of the big players in self-driving have shown that while they can try to solve the tech problem, nobody can solve the team problem. Self-driving brings together people with very diverse backgrounds (perception, planning, controls, hardware, safety, rideshare product, etc), very diverse incentives (established automakers vs start-up founders vs VC investors), and throws them in a pot with a huge amount of money and greed. And does this to serve a public who largely doesn't trust self-driving AI today.

Waymo has had a ton of notable departures:

* Urmson made a good amount of money and left for Aurora.

* The founders of Nuro cashed in $40m each and left for their own thing.

* Levandowski made nearly a quarter billion and took off.

* Drago worked on Streetview and more Google-centric things, then went to Zoox to make about $100k (lol), then returned to Waymo.

* Now the era of Krafcik is coming to an end.

The perhaps unique thing about the self-driving problem is that all of the above individuals made tons of money without having delivered equitable value to end-users. At least not today. When Google was bleeding headcount to Facebook, both companies were making bank. It's surreal to see people minted with money for life and yet deliver so little value. That sort of arbitrage usually only happens on Wall Street.

I think it's worth reflecting on the era of Krafcik as a general success-- he was brought in to do hard work and he generally did a good job. But by no means did he (nor any of his predecessors) solve the "team" problem. Krafcik himself couldn't stick to the team he helped shape, nor the userbase he helped grow, at least nt long enough to actually deliver widespread value on the scale of his own compensation.

This seems like a cause and effect confusion.

Because no one can solve the tech problem, no one wants to stick around for the point where the failure is obvious.

Especially, for a while, self-driving cars have been at the level that impressive demos are possible but actual deployment isn't. So a fine career move is sticking around for long enough to create a demo and then leaving and blaming the failure on your successor.

Reason the tech can't deployed is that while 99% of driving problems involve just a complex, adaptive system, the 1% or .01% remaining involve "understanding what's happening", a far higher bar, one that requires a system well beyond what exists today.

This describes 99% of ML projects in industry. There is a reason the incentives are such that a science team creates a solution and then a theoretical engineering team deploys it. The Science team gets credit for the analysis/prototype but the prototype is so delayed getting to production that only the engineers take the blame or the scientists have moved on.

This describes 99% of ML projects in industry.

This may well be true given how fragile a construct most deep learning systems are.

But there are still substantially different deployment issues for different systems. Google can deploy a question-answerer or a search-by-image-description system and lowered accuracy in practice doesn't really do much damage. Google can't deploy a self-driving car with low safety in the same way.

Last .01% = “assume AGI…”

I'm willing to longbets $5000/20 years:

We won't have self driving cars that replace 30% or more of driving on existing roads and highways by 2040.

The problem is too hard and everyone's drunk the ML kool-aid. (Just like everyone is drinking the NFT kool-aid right now.)

Hype, unrealistic dreams, and spin.

We'll be on Mars before we have generally available self-driving cars that do not require humans.

I think it will happen, but in China. We are trying to solve the wrong problem.

When cars were introduced, people kept getting hit in the street. "Jaywalking" as a crime was created to shift the blame away from the technology (cars) to the victims (pedestrians).

For self-driving vehicles, it suffices that we outlaw the edge cases, and enforce it to make them insignificant. The Uber ATC crash? Blame the jaywalker. Kid chasing a ball in the street? Blame the parents. Treat self-driving cars the same way that we treat trains: get out of the way, or you've no one to blame but yourself.

What that leaves practically is preventing crashes with the static environment, self-driving cars, and "normal" road users (i.e. ones that can't be blamed if a collision occurs). This is much easier than the plastic bags and animals and cyclists and jaywalkers and wacky drivers that form most of the remaining unhandled 1%.

The only country that can pull this off, IMO, is China. The mix of authoritarianism plus technical prowess allows the missing 1% of cases to be bulldozed in the name of progress.

The ruling party can’t even keep the factories north of Beijing from dumping pollution into the capital city’s air (and thus the lungs of the leadership and their families) for more than a few weeks at a time. I wouldn’t count on them here.

I'd consider taking the bet, but only against, "We'll be on Mars before we have generally available self-driving cars that do not require humans."

Both seem unlikely.

I think we should throw commercial fusion in there for the trifecta.

>It's surreal to see people minted with money for life and yet deliver so little value. That sort of arbitrage usually only happens on Wall Street.

This must be a joke? The multi million-dollar exit with zero actual earnings is an almost uniquely tech phenomenon. There are Wall Street-ers that earned high pay for generating high earnings that many years later were found to be value-destructive, but at least at the time they were paid, they were cash-generating. That Wall Street jobs paid so much was because comp was structurally a function of cash generated.

The difference between “selling a growth story” and “selling current profits booked by incurring future liabilities” seems entirely like a semantic one. What’s the practical difference?

Sometimes the code monkeys actually code something.

What evidence there is a team problem. Like building cars requires all those things and companies manage to do it all the time. Adding the self driving tech in there, ok, but these cars already have teams upon teams of tech already working on them. Each part of the inboard computer has a different tech team which works with a different company it's outsourced to. In fact, sometimes different teams work with the same outsourcing company for different parts. That seems a very much a solved problem.

It also seems like you're not really also applying in the fact self driving cars are approved in how many places? And it takes approximately 5 years to get a standard car to market, getting a self driving car that has been tested in just 10 states, it's unreasonable to expect the value to end users you're expecting to see here. Getting the car to market seems to be the actual problem and that seems more of a legal issue of no one wanting to say yes on the major scale. This is a very slow moving industry, electric cars are basically a solved problem, yet we'll be seeing people buying combustion engine cars for decades.

How long has this project been going on for? 12-years? Seeing management change over that amount of time seems normal. It would be notable if we were seeing 1 or 2 people a month leave for 6 months.

Well, I think that they wouldn't be able to solve the tech problem even if they completely solved any and all team problems, so as far as the end users are concerned it doesn't really matter much whether they can solve the team problem. I think that full self driving almost certainly requires artificial general intelligence, and I don't think humanity is anywhere close to creating that, so all current self-driving car projects will end in failure.

I wonder to what extent the leaders of these self-driving car projects understand that their efforts to create the technology have almost no chance of success. How many of them understand this but carry on due to either wild optimism, or to just make money, or on the principle of "it's not up to me to decide whether to try, someone else is paying me to try"?

The degree to which self-driving car hype seized even the minds of many otherwise smart people in the last decade has been strange for me to see.

Don't these facts prove the opposite of your claim? You want to build a company with a culture that extends beyond individuals. All of these people left Waymo and the project is still robust. That's exactly what you want! Did you think Google was dead when Craig Silverstein left?

A lot of Googlers left Google for Facebook and yet Search is still robust. And Google still has revenue! Though Facebook is growing faster...

I’m not saying Waymo is dead, I’m saying creating a sustainable work culture for self-driving is really hard and Waymo evidently don’t have a solution for that. I actually thought Krafcik would be a balancer, but seems things didn’t work. That said, Waymo has made some other major HR mistakes... they hired (and soon fired) Tawni Cranz, one of the most toxic HR heads you could find...

I was talking with a friend who worked at IBM in the heyday. He mentioned that a lot of the time, it wasn't so much that talent got used, it was that talent was not used elsewhere. Stiffing innovation is just as effective as breeding it when you're already on top.

Bell Labs was pretty explicit about this being the reason they existed.

It was also the reason they filed patents. Like the answering machine patent: to prevent it from existing (commercially) for as long as possible.

I'm almost convinced many huge tech companies have massive staff simply to keep everyone else from hiring them. They do these "senior software engineer retention programs" paying employees to stay busy on insignificant projects. If none of the smart people are working for scrappy startups, nobody is going to invent something that disrupts the industry.

The problem is a venture problem / industry not teams and individuals ... VCs have been heavily investing in anything remotely promising because let's face it since smartphone tech hasn't found its solid step into the next level .. VCs have the money they throw it at promising companies, lots of people get rich in the process but the end result is delayed ether no working product or no working business (unit economics) an example is all these ride hailing apps, scooter apps and food delivery where billions has been spent and losses are recorded annually and everyone is happy to move the ball down the field and make it a tomorrow's problem.

I hear you, in that since the smart-phone there has not been a new consumer platform shift, with all the value creation for new B2C companies that a platform shift implies.

That said other parts of the ecosystem are having incredible bursts of innovation and new products: B2B SaaS, Cloud providers, Space (e.g. Starlink), Bio-Tech (e.g. Moderna and mRNA technology), Semi-conductors/Chip companies (TSMC + Nvidia + many many others).

If you're wondering why VCs are eager to back new companies with small revenue but fast growth - it's because interest rates are very low, and the returns to winning are very high.

Does Waymo have product market fit? I know you can ride around in one in Phoenix and they are learning how to manage those vehicles with remote assistance as necessary but is that sufficient?

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