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I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future.

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future. It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. Does anyone have a name for this type of advantage, or know of examples in other areas?

Yahivin 8y ago
Compound interest, Pareto principle, Matthew Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
gwern 8y ago
> It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections. This doesn't seem to be the case. Look at the California disengagement statistics over cumulative miles - it looks like it's logarithmic or something, certainly not accelerating. Or look at Waymo in Arizona: they are driving, what, 70,000 miles per month and have racked up cumulative millions there already; if there really were some sort of compound interest or exponential improvement, then after they solved it well enough to go live and started racking up all those miles, self-driving cars should be on the verge of being solved & going global unless you postulate an enormous distance in between 'good enough to drive customers around Arizona' and 'good enough to drive customers around everywhere'.