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0 pointsdmix5y ago0 comments

And nothing about this deal indicates Uber is stepping away from self driving cars.

They basically structured the deal as buying stock in the company and investing $400M.

Letting them focus on their core business while still having a large financial stake in AI cars.

The big development is that self driving cars turned out to be an extremely hard problem which didn’t match company timelines (or potentially company business models, if for example AI kits can get installed in existing cars and brands for which they become the denominate call network) and they outsourced it to one of the best companies around.

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cmsj5y ago

"turned out"... it's been starkly obvious since day one that true self-driving is a problem that requires general intelligence to solve. All you have to do to know that is drive a car and think about what's actually required to successfully drive from A to B in the real world.

howlgarnish5y ago

Waymo is running self-driving cars with paying passengers and no backup drivers right now in Phoenix, and last I checked we don't have general AI yet.

https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way...

Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.

bo10245y ago

This doesn't prove that the technology is ready or safe. It only proves that Waymo thinks it's a worthwhile gamble. This is the same place where Uber's self-driving car killed a person with no repercussions to the company.

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2muchcoffeeman5y ago

The obvious question is, why does this work in Phoenix?

Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.

You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?

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dTal5y ago

That's not moving the goalposts, those are the goalposts. Anyone can make a car that loops round a racetrack by itself, on a good day (well, not anyone, but it's relatively straightforward). The challenge is making it robust against "the real world".

jessaustin5y ago

Something something "self-driving-complete"...

DennisP5y ago

Not human-level AI, though. Plenty of animals do fine with challenging navigational problems. Birds fly through forests, catch or evade other birds, cross continents, etc.

stefan_5y ago

What am I even reading. "Nothing indicates Uber is stepping away from self driving cars". Yeah right.

ttmb5y ago

Prior to this deal, Uber had a couple of billion (at the value of this deal) in a self driving car company named ATG. After this deal, they have a couple of billion in a self driving car company named Aurora.

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