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For all the hype LLMs and chatbots get in this day and age, Waymo has an actual AI product out in the real world in a safety critical setting and is flying completely under the radar. It doesn’t help that they go about their work quietly without much fanfare, but it still amazes me how they’re not the poster child for modern day AI given how state of the art their tech is [1].

[1] https://waymo.com/research/

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Their marketing is very modest at this stage. Similar to early Google, they're letting their technology and experience do the job for them.

There seem to be a lot of prominent people in the valley, mostly who are heavily invested in competitors (e.g. VC Brad Gerstner), who like to spread the misconception that Waymo uses minimal AI and hand codes a lot of their system. They also take the view that using mapping and lidar can't scale. Maybe they'll turn out to be right, but it comes across as cope to me.

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