Hacker News Reader

Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

View on HN

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

> "small town" in "Southern Europe"

I've highlighted the two main issues you are currently experiencing.

Then it's not a solved problem.

From what I've seen with Waymo, autonomous driving in relatively good conditions (light to medium rain, fog, or sunny) is a solved technical problem, even in small, winding streets. Snow is the next big hurdle, and they're actively working on that in Denver and Detroit.

They're being conservative with their rollout mostly because of civic issues. Most places do not have a legal framework for "what if your autonomous vehicle hits someone?" yet. Even if Waymos never were at fault for a collision with a person, you can always have cases like the one in Georgia back in October where a bicyclist wasn't looking where they were going and rammed into one. The shaky legal ground is a pretty big impediment right now, and that's in the US where we have much laxer laws about corporations killing people.

Yeah, I suspected that, but legislation and dealing with who is responsible and what happens if an autonomous vehicles directly kills/hurts someone or is involved in an accident it IS part of the problem, luckily.

Then, there will be concerns about the scaling costs. If it makes economical sense only in densely populated zones, what's the point? I mean, yes, it will be yet another business that works only in cities in that case, but that will not then make it universal as cars are.

If they can pull off year round driving in Manhattan, and they have, it’s a solved problem. Rollout it slow due to bureaucracy, appetite for progressiveness and catering to entrenched business interests but it will show up everywhere it’s profitable eventually.

It's not just a data problem, it's a hardware problem. Transformer-based robots require even more processing power than plain LLMs, as they also need to process visual and spatial/touch input. We don't have GPUs capable of fast inference on a SOTA LLM that would fit in a robot brain form factor, let alone also run fast enough spatial and visual processing. And there's currently nothing even approaching a feasible solution for cooling such a device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com