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by dkarapetyan 3358 days ago
I think you're downplaying the actual engineering required. Robotics is more than just actuators. Robotics folks have been doing sensor fusion, control, and learning for much longer than software ML folks have been doing those same things.

I'm saying a software company is not gonna crack the market. Software companies neither have the expertise nor the engineering discipline. Boston Robotics and Google have been famously not getting along and their self-driving division seems to have been horribly mismanaged for a long time and we are now seeing the fallout in the form of lawsuits.
1 comments
seanmcdirmid 3358 days ago
http://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/partner_robot/histor...

Industrial robots, and humanoid robots for entertainment purposes. Whereas Google has many of the founders of ML, not to mention its experts. Is Toyota, who already seriously undervalue software, willing to pay top dollar for those people when their average SDE makes < $60K/year (not just a problem with Toyota, but Japan in general)?

You also seriously misunderstanding the amount of engineering discipline needed to build modern software systems.

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dkarapetyan 3358 days ago
Misunderstanding? Given that my day job is to literally build tools and infrastructure for "modern software systems" I don't think I'm misunderstanding things at all.

But whatever I can say on "modern software" has already been said much better by Alan Kay so I'm going to defer to him for the rest of this conversation.

I'll buy Toyota stock. You buy Google stock. We'll compare notes in a decade and see who managed to make self-driving cars commercially viable.

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seanmcdirmid 3358 days ago
I guess you'll find Toyota stock to be incredibly undervalued with a P/E of just 9.5 vs. GOOG's 30.26. The market isn't treating Toyota like a tech company. The market has already spoken, they've placed their bet on Google, which means that boat has already sailed. If you believe TM will make a tremendous comeback, then you could make bank, but that is a risky bet vs. a safe one (given today's information).
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flamedoge 3358 days ago
I'll just twiddle my thumb and look bullish on Tesla
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