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My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some

My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems. This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.

TulliusCicero 8mo ago
The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem. Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.
- throw310822 8mo ago
  Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
  - TulliusCicero 8mo ago
    It's already been solved city by city, so I don't know what you're talking about.
    - throw310822 8mo ago
      Cool, so where can I buy a car in which, wherever I am, I can comfortably sit at the back knowing that it will take me to destination like a good driver? Or that I can summon to come to pick me up?
      - TulliusCicero 8mo ago
        You can't, because the only actually autonomous cars right now are robotaxis.
        throw310822 8mo ago
        Ah, and why so? Why are they introduced city by city?
        TulliusCicero 8mo ago
        To verify they can operate safely in any given city, and because you need operations staff and resources in every city for a robotaxi service. Same reason Tesla is doing it that way.

TulliusCicero 8mo ago

The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem. Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.

throw310822 8mo ago
Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
- TulliusCicero 8mo ago
  It's already been solved city by city, so I don't know what you're talking about.
  - throw310822 8mo ago
    Cool, so where can I buy a car in which, wherever I am, I can comfortably sit at the back knowing that it will take me to destination like a good driver? Or that I can summon to come to pick me up?
    - TulliusCicero 8mo ago
      You can't, because the only actually autonomous cars right now are robotaxis.
      - throw310822 8mo ago
        Ah, and why so? Why are they introduced city by city?
        TulliusCicero 8mo ago
        To verify they can operate safely in any given city, and because you need operations staff and resources in every city for a robotaxi service. Same reason Tesla is doing it that way.