Granted, but there is arguably a lot more money behind autonomous driving than there ever was behind speech recognition and synthesis. It was a different proble

Granted, but there is arguably a lot more money behind autonomous driving than there ever was behind speech recognition and synthesis. It was a different problem space, but the situation is probably comparable to the space race - the winner will dominate a new market of hundreds of billions in size. The motivation is really really strong, and with it comes lots of funding and talent.