minwcnt5

Reread the comment: Shazeer was the one shitposting about politics, not Jeff Dean. Dean called him out over it.

Depends where you live. In SF, parking alone is more than $300/mo if you have to pay for a spot. Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.

You can probably infer the average number of active cars from trips and utilization metrics, which are out there (at least for California I believe they report this).

E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.

Alphabet is only giving up around a 3% stake. They continue to own most of it, and mostly bet their own money.

I think some of the external investors have board seats, so the outside people do get a (small) say in things. And to your point, that's probably also a good thing for avoiding another Stadia mistake.

"Yes it is that bad" - every woman I've ever talked to.

Building out depot and charging infrastructure and working with city officials are both slow processes, so I imagine you'll see them prioritize spreading out to a lot of cities first, in the most profitable areas (downtown), then expand the service area in each of them over time as they get more cars.

There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.

I think you just described the entire Bernal Heights neighborhood in SF (except with 20+ degree steepness on top of that).

People say yes it drives, but it drives like a rookie

I think you just made this up. Almost every anecdote I've heard, and I spend a lot of time in two cities where it's launched, is that "it drives better than most humans". Which is exactly how I would characterize it too. It doesn't drive exactly like a human. But for every subtle human behavior it doesn't do, there are probably several things it does much more skillfully than a human.

European cities have lots of taxis. Same with Asian cities. They will obviously have AVs in the future. I'm not sure why you think they should be mutually exclusive with transit.

It's a "joke" (I wouldn't call it that, but it's a vastly different product) because you have to pay attention to the road at all times.

You don't live in a Waymo city, so I understand. A lot of people who don't live in a Waymo city don't really get it.

Waymo is a completely different product than FSD. It's a robot that comes and drives you from point A to point B. You can do whatever you want while it's driving, such as take a nap or work on your laptop.

They're operating a Robotaxi service, not a robotaxi service.

If I create a shuttle bus service for my neighborhood and call it the "Space Shuttle", I am not operating a space shuttle.

I think the plan is that other entities will own and maintain the cars. That's why they're working with partners like Uber and Avis.

How much money they've spent in the past is irrelevant. That money all came from investors, in exchange for a stake in the company. It never needs to be "paid back". Besides which, those investors have earned all those funds back already, and then some (on paper).

All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.

I have a slightly different take than others on this: I think the main contributor is the fact Toronto's financial district is extremely dense compared to most if not all European cities, and serviced by a highly trafficked subway line that loops around it. Many of the large office skyscrapers are built right on top of the subway, and so they naturally have a public underground connection, and usually it's a mini-mall with a food court and amenities for the office workers. Because of downtown's density these kind of just merged together into the larger PATH network.

The weather is of course also a factor. It's just incredibly convenient in the winter, or even in the summer when it's muggy out, for office workers. You just hop onto the elevator during your lunch or coffee break, wearing your office clothes, no need to throw on a jacket or bring an umbrella or anything. It's just an extension of your office building basically.

Toronto ALSO has healthy commercial streets all over the place that you access from street level and that DON'T connect to these tunnels. It's a very large city. The PATH tunnels are just one district.

Well, no, almost everything you said simply isn't true. Immigrants create jobs. They create homes. They make healthcare more available. Why? Because they work productively, they earn money, and they spend it in the US. "Illegals" do all this while paying taxes without being eligible for benefits, so arguably they help America more than an average citizen.

There are good reasons to limit immigration, but "they're taking our jobs" isn't one of them.

Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.

They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.

Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.

Maybe he knows something.

This also lets all of his co-investors in X, who were likely pissed that their shares tanked, exchange their shares at an inflated value (but one that still sees them losing 25% of their original investment) for shares in a trendy yet likely overvalued AI company that they consider to have more upside.

The other part of this is that if TSLA stock drops to $100-ish he'll be at risk of being margin called on the loans he took against his holdings to buy X. I wouldn't be surprised if this deal involves some X shares being sold for cash (that was raised from VCs) to pay down those loans, and/or the lenders agreeing to take xAI stock in lieu of cash.

This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme. I don't think this is the last time we've seen this type of move: he'll keep starting companies that are at the forefront of whatever the current hype cycle is, then leverage the extremely inflated valuations to benefit himself.

A Waymo employee replied to the Twitter thread and said the post's interpretation is incorrect.

One of the big flaws in Karpathy's logic is that it implies human vision is acceptable and sufficient for an AV. The reality, as Cruise found out, seems to be that society will demand AVs are much safer than humans.

Human vision is an existence proof for human-level performance without lidar, but Waymo is an existence proof for 10x human performance WITH lidar. Right now the latter is where the bar is, and it'll keep being raised. I don't think at this point one could get away with deploying AVs at scale that are significantly less safe than Waymo.

Also: if sensor fusion is so hard, why is Waymo able to solve it but not Tesla?

They drive in downtown SF, downtown LA and soon Tokyo. I've been to all these cities and besides occasional snow, I don't see what's so special about NYC. Shibuya Crossing is even busier than Times Square.

What's the difference in your eyes that makes these things the absolute best drivers on the road in SF, but not competent to drive in NYC?

Those points will help, but they aren't sufficient. Sometimes it's necessary to have an instant reaction time and do more than just slam the brakes, like this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1hfvb5o/waymo_visual...

These videos are from three and six years ago, lol.

People sure are reading a lot into my comment that I feel "more vulnerable" on the sidewalk than in a Waymo. That doesn't mean I think walking is dangerous. (It can definitely be unpleasant in some locations though, for a variety of reasons.)

San Francisco. I do walk and take transit all the time, but I'm a man. My wife has been chased by mentally ill people bin broad daylight. The risk to me is low, but I still make sure I'm aware of my surroundings.

I don't think this is unique to SF. Even in very safe cities there's surely a higher chance of being mugged walking down a dark street than riding in a 5000 lbs vehicle with tinted windows.

If training data is such an edge for Tesla, how is it that Waymo works so much better than FSD with only 1/1000th the data?

I also don't see any evidence that Waymo can't work anywhere. They recently expanded to Austin, and it seems that it immediately drives better than FSD.

Boston? Pfft. I'm not going to get excited until this can drive in rural Turkmenistan. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35834271).

ridiculous intersections and confusing rules that only humans can do

LLMs are already better at this than humans:

https://x.com/petergyang/status/1707169696049668472

I think it's actually going to be the other way around. We'll build infrastructure exclusive to AVs where the rules are too complicated for humans, but allow AV traffic to move more efficiently. For example, an AV shouldn't need to stop and wait at a red light if there's no traffic to wait for.

You can open the door and get out if it's stopped. You can press the "pull over" button to have it pull over as soon as it can safely do so. You can call rider support or 911 while the doors remain locked to the outside.

I agree that it's a slightly more vulnerable feeling than driving myself, but I still feel far less vulnerable than taking public transit or walking. And when you factor in risk of a crash, it's also safer than Uber or driving myself.

I don't think Waymos will often be targeted by criminals for anything besides vandalism, with 20+ cameras and potential remote monitors the risk:reward ratio is much worse than other options.