I'm sure they believe they're doing that, but as other posts have mentioned, it is extremely difficult to give google feedback. I happen to know a few googlers

I'm sure they believe they're doing that, but as other posts have mentioned, it is extremely difficult to give google feedback. I happen to know a few googlers socially from my days in SFLUG and BayLUG, so I can sometimes get a note to the appropriate product manager or engineer through the friends-of-a-friend network. But going through the front door has never worked. I believe that Google Maps is perfectly fine in most of the bay area. It's generally acceptable for roads that a google street view car has driven down. But pretty much a lost cause for other roads. Corner me at a conference sometime and I'll tell you about how google maps sent us four-wheeling through eastern california fire roads (a dirt road that collapsed after we turned around at a critical junction) or told me to get on and off the highway the first time I drove from Tacoma to Seattle (what should have been a simple 45 min drive with traffic turned out to be a 2 hour slog fest because I didn't have enough local knowledge to realize maps was full of itself.) While it's great they no-doubt are providing an internship for two or three PhD candidates, I think they may want to fix their data before thinking AI will improve the experience. The AI does not know the data you're training it with is garbage. If yoy do it right, you may be able to spot anomolies in the data or auto-cluster bits of data, but if you train any sort of CNN on garbage data, you're going to get garbage out. So while this may be great for people commuting from the GooglePlex in Mountain View to the Google facilities in San Francisco, and it //may// help people traveling along I-5 in California, I fear the garbage aspect of their geo data will not be magically solved by adding AI.