Waymo cars are highly geofenced in areas with good weather and good quality roads. They only just (in January) gained the capability to drive on freeways.
Let me know when you can get a Waymo to drive you from New York to Montreal in winter.
> Waymo cars are highly geofenced in areas with good weather and good quality roads. They only just (in January) gained the capability to drive on freeways
They are an existence proof that the original claim that we seem further than ever before is just wrong.
There are 6 categories of self driving, starting at 0. The final level is the one we've obviously been aiming at, and most were expecting. It's fully automated self driving in all conditions and scenarios. Get in your car anywhere, and go to anywhere - with capability comparable to a human. Level 4, by contrast, is full self driving under certain circumstances and generally in geofenced areas - basically trolleys without rails. Get in a car, so long as conditions are favorable, and go to a limited set of premapped locations.
And level 4 is where Waymo is, and is staying. Their strategy is to to use tiny geofenced areas with a massive amount of preprocessing, mapping out every single part of an area, not just in terms of roads but also every single meta indicator - sign, signals, cross walks, lanes, and so on. And it creates a highly competent, but also highly rigid system. If road conditions change in any meaningful way, the most likely outcome with this strategy is simply that the network gets turned off until the preprocessing can be carried and reuploaded again. That's completely viable in small geofenced areas, but doesn't generalize at all.
So the presence of Waymo doesn't say much of anything about the presence of level 5 autonomy. If anything it suggests Waymo believes that level 5 autonomy is simply out of reach, because the overwhelming majority of tech that they're researching and developing would have no role whatsoever in level 5 automation. Tesla is still pushing for L5 automation, but if they don't achieve this then they'll probably just end up getting left behind by companies that double down on L4. And this does indeed seem to be the most likely scenario for the foreseeable future.
This sounds suspiciously like that old chestnut, the god of the gaps. You're splitting finer and finer hairs to maintain your position that, "no, really, they're not really doing what I'm saying they can't do", all the while self-driving cars are spreading and becoming more capable every year.
I don't think we have nearly as much visibility on what Waymo seems to believe about this tech as you seem to imply, nor do I think that their beliefs are necessarily authoritative. You seem disheartened that we haven't been able to solve self-driving in a couple of decades, and I'm of the opinion that geez, we basically have self-driving now and we started trying only a couple of decades ago.
How long after the invention of the transistor did we get personal computers? Maybe you just have unrealistic expectations of technological progress.
Level 5 was the goal and the expectation that everybody was aiming for. Waymo's views are easy to interpret from logically considering their actions. Level 4, especially as they are doing it, is in no way whatsoever a stepping stone to level 5. Yet they're spending tremendous resources directed towards things that would have literally and absolutely no place in level 5 autonomy. It seems logically inescapable to assume that not only do they think they'll be unable to hit level 5 in the foreseeable future, but also that nobody else will be able to either. If you can offer an alternative explanation or argument, please share!
Another piece of evidence also comes from last year when Google scaled back Waymo with layoffs as well as "pausing" its efforts at developing self driving truck technology. [1] That technology would require something closer to L5 autonomy, because again - massive preprocessing is quite brittle and doesn't scale well at all. Other companies that were heavily investing in self-driving tech have done similarly. For instance Uber sold off its entire self-driving division in 2021. I'm certainly happy to hear any sort of counter-argument, but you need some logic instead of ironically being the one trying to mindread me or Waymo!
Not necessarily. If self-driving cars "aren't ready" and then you redefine what ready is, you've absolutely got your thumb on the scale of measuring progress.
> "15 years ago self driving of any sort was pure fantasy, yet here we are."
This was 38 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntIczNQKfjQ - "NavLab 1 (1986) : Carnegie Mellon : Robotics Institute History of Self-Driving Cars; NavLab or Navigation Laboratory was the first self-driving car with people riding on board. It was very slow, but for 1986 computing power, it was revolutionary. NavLab continued to lay the groundwork for Carnegie Mellon University's expertise in the field of autonomous vehicles."
This was 30+ years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HbVWm7wdmE - "Short video about Ernst Dickmanns VaMoR and VaMP projects - fully autonomous vehicles, which travelled thousands of miles autonomously on public roads in 1980s."
This was 29 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAMVogK2TTk - "A South Korean professor [... Han Min-hong's] vehicle drove itself 300km (186 miles) all the way from Seoul to the southern port of Busan in 1995."
It's okay! We'll just hook up 4o to the Waymo and get quippy messages like those in 4o's demo videos: "Oh, there's a tornado in front of you! Wow! Isn't nature exciting? Haha!"
As long as the Waymo can be fed with the details, we'll be good. ;)
Joking aside, I think there are some cases where moving the goalposts is the right approach: once the previous goalposts are hit, we should be pushing towards the new goalposts. Goalposts as advancement, not derision.
I suppose the intent of a message matters, but as people complain about "well it only does X now, it can't do Y" - probably true, but hey, let's get it to Y, then Z, then... who knows what. Challenge accepted, as the worn-out saying goes.
Let me know when you can get a Waymo to drive you from New York to Montreal in winter.