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I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only

by bertil 3y ago

I see the benefits from both for now, but I’m not capturing how they could agree on the long-term negotiation. There is so much upside in a few months for only one side of that deal… That was always the issue with Uber promising self-driving cars: human drivers have an unknown, uncontrollable deadline.

kortilla 3y ago
Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?
- bertil 3y ago
  They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly. Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor. And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system. If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
        As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is very much a “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” kind of technology. People can promise anything about AI, because when it works it feels like magic. But it’s not magic, and we can’t expect every goal to be met just because someone is using AI. Nobody knows what challenges lie ahead for an end to end self driving system precisely because no one has done it. And it should be noted that with their “hydra net” architecture it is relatively end to end but it is not a single large network, but an engineered assortment of many small networks. Quite a lot of human choice goes in to decisions around how to design that, and this also leads to edge cases. But even more general systems like GPT-4 suffer from issues with edge cases. We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. Human eyes and the human brain are so much more advanced than a computer and cameras, it may not follow that “images are all you need”.
        londons_explore 3y ago
hanniabu 3y ago
If I were Uber I would structure this as "we'll integrate waymo as a trial and if it's successful then we'll acquire waymo after x period of time"
- anthlax 3y ago
  Google will absolutely not sell Waymo after such an incredibly steep investment.

by bertil 3y ago

kortilla 3y ago

Are you sure Uber sees no viable replacement for Waymo?

bertil 3y ago
They could buy a lot of Teslas or partner with a Waymo competitor, but I doubt anyone with a working automated fleet will need Uber’s human drivers. Acquiring riders is cheap—good PR, a handful of promo codes: branded cars all over the city will do the rest. That partnership makes sense in the transition period when Waymo can’t buy enough cars to scale for football matches, handle edge cases, and build a larger fleet operation team. I think the individual Uber talent (operations, software, etc.) are great. Their experimentation team, for instance, is 100% something I’d recommend acquiring wholesale. Even with a thousand better options at Google, I’m sure their back-end solutions are work acqui-hiring. But Uber itself? The confusing everything app? It’s a bad brand whose toe-stepping values are misaligned with what anyone is trying to do (except maybe Tesla) and with a ton of tech debt. I know there was a lot of effort to escape it, but I don’t see great synergies. With Booking, maybe?
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Also Tesla has backed off on claims their cars will be self driving without a human safety driver. They’ll get there eventually but Waymo is far ahead of them on actual deployment of this tech.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    With the boss mentioning multiple times that he wants end to end AI - ie. pixels in, steering angle out, I think this may change quickly. Nobody else has managed to get end to end AI working, but this sort of stuff scales with training data, and tesla has the opportunity to collect far more than any other manufacturer, with possibly 1000x the number of cars collecting video data of the next closest competitor. And the thing about end to end AI is I suspect that if anyone can get it working at all, it may not have the issues with the long tail of unusual situations that other approaches have. Things like "Someone has drawn a picture of a bear on the road in chalk, should I drive over it or around it?" might be answered better by the end to end system than a rules based system. If all of those things work out, then Tesla will win this race. Otherwise, they'll lose.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      As you say, no one has figured end to end out. The way AI works some tasks get figured out quickly and some take a very long time. Elon has been talking about an end to end system for a very long time, and I’ve watched every lecture from Andrej Karpathy on their architecture. I like their plan, but they have been working towards end to end for years and I see no reason to believe anything will “change quickly”. AI is very much a “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” kind of technology. People can promise anything about AI, because when it works it feels like magic. But it’s not magic, and we can’t expect every goal to be met just because someone is using AI. Nobody knows what challenges lie ahead for an end to end self driving system precisely because no one has done it. And it should be noted that with their “hydra net” architecture it is relatively end to end but it is not a single large network, but an engineered assortment of many small networks. Quite a lot of human choice goes in to decisions around how to design that, and this also leads to edge cases. But even more general systems like GPT-4 suffer from issues with edge cases. We still don’t even know how plausible a camera based system is. Human eyes and the human brain are so much more advanced than a computer and cameras, it may not follow that “images are all you need”.
      - londons_explore 3y ago

hanniabu 3y ago

If I were Uber I would structure this as "we'll integrate waymo as a trial and if it's successful then we'll acquire waymo after x period of time"

anthlax 3y ago
Google will absolutely not sell Waymo after such an incredibly steep investment.