> Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”
Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle
Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle
I'd be far more prepared to argue Waymo is presently another poster child for a failing Google x project.
Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro. If Waymo services your home address -- and it services a lot of residential area -- then you can probably get anywhere you'd want to go around Phoenix in a driverless taxi.
> What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years?
I have no insider info, but I'd expect SF and LA County to roll out in the next few years and significant coverage of major metros by the end of next decade.
Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.
Don't know why you are saying sorry to me either. They are happening of course, but to say its "landed" at Waymo is hilarious to me.
> Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro.
Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country. You've also conveniently skipped addressing the current lack of any profit for Google what-so-ever too - a core component of most people's definition of a new line of business being a success. You can't even point to meaningful user growth given the tiny percentage of the country it operates in.
1. IDK why anyone would spend the money to do driverless everywhere in the USA. You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money.
2. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the time to go from one metro to N metros in not N*(lifetime of waymo). Ie, the hard part is done. The product has made it to market, at least in the sunbelt, and the poo-poo attitude about being able to go anywhere in the Phoenix metro without a driver is a pretty amazing dismissal.
When this actually happens, then we can discuss Waymo's "landing". This is all hypothetical today.
It's not about traversing the whole USA - its about serving more than a handful of customers in demo areas, relatively speaking. Waymo has never done this to date.
I'm not disputing Waymo could go somewhere - it might! It hasn't so far.
The equivalent of the moon landing for self driving tech is closer to “they have driven a lot of miles without anybody in the driver seat”, which both Cruise and Waymo have done (>1M miles)
The entire point of Google's moonshots is new profitable businesses, of which Waymo is not and has never been. Comparing to the United States Government because they both used the term "moonshot" is beyond silly.
For a Google moonshot to land, it has to make money, or it won't continue to exist. It's really not a complex concept.
I know ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Adobe Firefly, And GitHub Co-Pilot in this space. Where’s Google?
Let me guess: Brain’s research led to those products? Even if that were the case, Google still failed to market and capitalize. Are they running an open research lab for the greater good? Or are they still interested in launching market-leading products?
You could say the same thing about Brain or Waymo.
But google is a fast follower. Let's wait and see.
Also - did you miss "many other internally used tools/infra" part - if they can feed ads infra and increase revenue by a meager 1%, that's more than enough to make up for all others combined in revenue generated.
Bard just launched and it may be a $100B product in a few years, but now it’s still playing catch-up to OpenAI (that started without any moonshot and “only” with $1B in its first major seed round [0]).
I don’t think that’s fair in the sense that going to the moon was absurdly difficult in 1962. It’s hard to compare things so different, but going to the moon only seems easier now, 60 years later. At the time of the moonshot it was one of the most difficult things humanity ever attempted.