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When will this be rolled out to everywhere else?
by AutistiCoder 2y ago
When will this be rolled out to everywhere else?
- dvh 2y agoIn 2024 it had $365 million in revenue but $1.13 billion expenses.
- OnlineGladiator 2y agoI love that you included numbers, but that is for all of Alphabet's "other bets" which includes Waymo, so it's not entirely Waymo. It still helps give ballpark figures though.
- htrp 2y agoisn't waymo the majority of alphabets other bets?
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoIn terms of revenue - but less so in terms of costs. I wouldn't be surprised if WayMo is losing <$200M instead of ~$800M like the above post made it seem. Additionally - the majority of those losses could come from expansion efforts. I wouldn't be surprised if WayMo already has profitable unit economics.
- OnlineGladiator 2y agoI would be astonished if Waymo has profitable unit economics. They're probably closer to spending $10 for every $1 they make. I made my initial fortune working on self-driving cars and there are many reasons the revolution that was supposed to come 10 years ago has yet to arrive.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoMaybe you're misunderstanding unit economics. It sounds like you're talking about net losses for the company. You think it costs them $500 to operate a $50 ride? How? And why? Unit economics does not include the previous r&d to map the city and train the model to drive the car. It's literally the cost of the car going from point a to point b - and amortizing other operational costs like maintenance and cleaning.
- OnlineGladiator 2y agoI'm not talking about net loss, I'm talking about operating costs. The maps they make for self-driving cars are made constantly - it's not something they make every year. They're updated weekly, if not daily - and they use a separate much more expensive car to do it. There's a whole separate team just for dealing with this. The amount of data the taxis collect is insane. Terabytes of data per car per hour, which needs to be stored and processed and transported (the data is so much it often makes more sense to physically ship hard drives than to send it over the internet). The "phone home" team is paid employees, and in order to have cellular service to the cars the companies pay a much more expensive plan with cellular providers than you're used to with your cellphone. The engineers who are maintaining the software and making fixes cost money. The people that clean and maintain the cars cost money. Not to mention the wear and tear on the vehicle (which includes the extremely expensive sensor suite) and the electricity to move the vehicle. I am saying the unit economics, which has nothing to do with the previously spent billions of dollars or efforts of expansion, is currently dogshit for self-driving cars. Theoretically it will improve with scale, but Waymo isn't at scale yet. I think people that haven't worked in robotics have this notion that robots are wildly profitable but this is a common fallacy. Robots almost always lose money, and usually a shitload.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago> Robots almost always lose money, and usually a shitload. That can be true, but they still can (and should be) profitable in unit economics.
- 2y ago
- cloudwalking 2y agoverily
- OnlineGladiator 2y agoYeah, supposedly Verily had $559 MM in revenue in 2022, so total revenue for other bets (including Verily and Waymo) being 65% of that is pretty weird.
- standardUser 2y agoWaymo has deep pockets and an incentive to play it safe. What it doesn't have is fierce competition forcing it to rush. Maybe that will change if/when Amazon's Zoox premiers this year.
- inerte 2y agoAugust 9th 2038. 11:42am. Zulu time.
- rwmj 2y agoGood - a few months after Y2K38 so they'll have worked out all the problems by then.