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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I look forward to reading good books about it in a decade or so. I think there are lots of lessons to be learned here for how to do a certain kind of difficult new thing.

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I'd like to read that book too... but "how to do a certain kind of difficult new thing" in their case involved more than solid execution. It also needed an owner/investor with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities that vastly accelerated their work, who was willing to throw huge amounts of money at the problem for years, along with favorable economic conditions (zero-percent interest rates) for long periods of time, at the right period of time. I give Waymo tons of credit for their work here, but the conditions that enabled it aren't easily repeatable IMO.

The reason it's interesting (IMO) is that other companies that also had owner/investors with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities have been throwing huge amounts of money at it in the same favorable interest rate environment, but with seemingly a lot less success.

I think their (apparent) success probably does have a lot to do with some combination of having the deepest pockets and (I think?) being a few years earlier to get started than everyone else, but still, it also looks like they had a better strategy, and I'm pretty curious how that worked.

It is fascinating how Google simultaneously provides a great lesson in how to leverage their primary competency of AI, as well as how not to (losing to OpenAI in LLMs).

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