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First mover advantage snowballs: real-life client deployments increase the miles driven hundredfold and the revenue increases the resources devoted to mapping a
by MagnumOpus 6y ago
First mover advantage snowballs: real-life client deployments increase the miles driven hundredfold and the revenue increases the resources devoted to mapping and to fix rare situations with manual fixes to either maps or AI.
The behemoth company with custom mapping of every road in your country and manual remapping of construction sites will provide a far better experience than the scrappy AI start-up. (And they can probably leverage that to gain better insurance rates, or to get driving licences in places where second movers can't.)
- sjg007 6y agoThis doesn't mean that self driving is a winner take all market.
- lumost 6y agoIt does mean that buying the alternative will usually be a "crappy" choice. Leaving the incumbent with the ability to charge a margin and hire better devs. There will be other players who are competitive locally, or provide "good enough" solutions for some customers. * Assuming any player finds a viable business model, and that our current understanding of ML, Computer Vision, and control systems is sufficient to produce a commercially viable product.
- sjg007 6y agoWhy? I am sure self-driving will have regulations around it for specific performance guarantees.
- lumost 6y agoI think that's where "good enough" comes in. It's likely that some companies will be just compliant, whereas the market leader is well ahead of compliance. e.g. a car that safely comes to a stop in an unhandled situation vs. a car that can handle the situation. It's also possible that the space also reaches commodity status where no differentiators emerge ( as one would expect with a big S curve in performance ).
- kortilla 6y agoThen Tesla already won because they have the most miles/data? Doesn’t seem sound.