I definitely recognize the large amount of progress that's being made in ML and AI recently (I'm a computer vision researcher in grad school) and appreciate the

I definitely recognize the large amount of progress that's being made in ML and AI recently (I'm a computer vision researcher in grad school) and appreciate the amount of it that's being done in the open (at least through papers, but also commonly with open source code). However I haven't really seen what's happened in vision/NLP/speech happening with recent research in self-driving cars. Google in particular has been relatively secretive about their work and conservative in publishing any technical details, especially compared with their ML research. In fact, I don't think they've published any conference/journal papers or tech reports about autonomous driving at all (but would be happy to be corrected on this). As I understand it, they essentially bought Stanford's entire team working on the problem 5-10 years ago and have kept them working in stealth mode at Google X on it since then, sharing nothing beyond vague public statements with no technical details. Uber made a similar move, gutting CMU's robotics department a year or so ago, and I'd be kind of shocked to see them go in the opposite direction from Google on this re: publishing. I think, to a much greater extent than problems like computer vision or NLP, many of the breakthroughs and much of the difficulty in making self-driving cars work are all about painstaking engineering efforts to ensure that every base is covered than breakthroughs in AI, making it difficult for me to imagine how the knowledge could be shared short of, as you mentioned, an Android-like move where someone decides to open source essentially the entire project. Seems unlikely to me in this case, but you never know.