I'm obviously biased, and I probably have more gripes than most about Waymo as a corporate entity, but the premise this article seems to be based on is "Waymo is a zombie company who will never release a real product" or something similar?
They seem to be scaling just fine. Here in SF they're ubiquitous and most people I know use them regularly (and usually prefer them to rideshare). Sure, it's not the type of growth possible with pure software, but they're doing 500k rides/week and are looking to be doing 1MM/week by the end of the year. What scale does this business need to be for the author to consider them a real company?
I think the assumption is valid. Most of the reasoning components of the next gen (and some current gen) robotics will use VLMs to some extent. Deciding if a temporary construction sign is valid seems to fall under this use case.
But unless you are using a single, end-to-end model for the entire driving stack, that "proceed" command will never influence accelerator pedal.
Sure, there will be a VLM for reading the signs, but the worst it'd be able to output is things like "there is a "detour" sign at (123, 456) pointing to road #987" - and some other, likley non-LLM, mechanism will ensure that following that road is actually safe.
Not a "proceed" command but they can influence the accelerator. I had a dodge ram van that would constantly decelerate on cruise control due to reading road signs. The signs in some states like California for trucks towing trailers are 55 mph but the speed limit would be 65 or 70 mph. The cruise control would detect the sign and suddenly decelerate to 55.
That's an example of things working as expected - the sign recognition system is very limited, in that it can only return road sign information. So it can _ask_ cruise control system to change the speed, but it's up to cruise control to decide if it's safe to obey the request or not. For example, I am pretty sure it'll never raise the speed, no mater what sign recognition system says.
In that case working at a startup would be a thing someone would only do as a last resort, and the talent pool would consequently be extremely low quality. Sounds damaging to the scene to me.
Man it's already over. It's hard to imagine the US autos EVER catching up at this point, even with state support.
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