[boxcardavin]

This is bizarre, I’m in non-car autonomy but I talk daily with car autonomy folks. Everyone has been expecting a consolidation of companies through acquisitions but drive.ai showed us that it’s probably not going to happen. At The Information mobility event last month one of the SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else. Looks like backing up billions with more billions might be the playbook for now.

[mrep]

> SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else.

Lol, of course they said that as their entire investment strategy is to throw more dumb money at startups than anyone else can possibly match. Their vision fund VC has been investing $100 billion dollars and they're planning on doing another $100 billion dollar fund. "To put the fund’s magnitude in perspective, its size is almost double the investments made by U.S. venture firms last year. PitchBook data shows that VC fundraising in the U.S. totaled $53.9 billion last year across more than 200 funds, and that was the largest annual raise in at least a decade." [0]

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/softbanks-100-billion-vision...

[nutjob2]

I think the corporate types are assuming that throwing money and engineers at the problem is going to "win" it, but I'm not sure it will. Google has plenty of both of those things and they seem to be stalling at the moment, or the very least they're not confident enough to go out and claim the market for themselves.

I think the engineers have been probably been wildly optimistic as usual, and the last 5% of car autonomy is going to take as much effort as the first 95%, or maybe double that.

[threeseed]

Not sure how many Data Scientists you know but I've worked with hundreds over the years and have never met a single one who was irrationally optimistic about the work they do. In fact generally it is the opposite.

But you know the sort of people who are wildly optimistic and prone to over-exaggeration. Executives like Musk.

[Hydraulix989]

Seems like those types are the ones fetishized here in the Valley (and end up getting showered with cash accordingly).

[dd36]

Musk succeeds.

[xiaolingxiao]

as another datapoint, I worked at GRASP lab and half of my classmates went Waymo, or some other self driving car company. They go there because of the calibur of co-workers, many of them do no believe self driving cars on residential roads is possible within the next 10 years. In fact, one of the robotics professors here (who is no stranger to PR hype) said: self driving cars with pedestrians on the roads is impossible

Most are optimistic about highway driving in California though.

[konschubert]

> one of the SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else

This may not be true if there is still a fundamental leap to be made

[threeseed]

Not sure if there are necessarily fundamental leaps needed.

Rather hundreds or thousands of small leaps. For example solving problems like this:

https://sites.google.com/view/lidar-adv

[vladislav]

yeah it's called unsupervised learning

[dasbo]

Hm, I would say that some consolidtion happened with that deal. Quote: "VW is also handing over Autonomous Intelligent Driving, the self-driving subsidiary that was launched just two years ago to develop autonomous vehicle technology for the Volkswagen Group. AID is valued at $1.6 billion.

The Munich-based AID team will become Argo’s European headquarters, a move that will expand its staff 40% to more than 700 employees."

AID has been Audi's L4/L5 development arm, which was separate from VW's main research arm. It also helps to judge the size of this deal, because VW only seems to invest one billion in capital and the remaining 1.6 billion investment is AID. It would be interesting to know, how they came up with that valuation ...

[tjoff]

I would have thought that Uber had proved that you can't just throw money at the problem.

[choppaface]

Uber proved it's possible to burn a lot of money on a team that is ineffective due to needless infighting and excessive internal competition.

[amelius]

In other words, you can't just throw money at the problem.

[Hydraulix989]

It's R&D and depends on a lot of new innovation to be solved (new ASIC hardware for real-time inferencing, new ML model types -- potentially a new breakthrough even).

[choppaface]

There are some things that money can accelerate and some things it can't. Building a balanced, effective team is not a clear linear function of money.

[saalweachter]

You need more of a targeted money laser than a money shotgun.

[baybal2]

> SoftBank fellas said that autonomous cars will be ‘won’ by those who can outspend everyone else.

Listen to them more. What else do you expect fund managers to say?

We will not see any real self driving in our generation, and may be not even after. That is much more for practical consideration than that of technical possibility.

Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads

[Hydraulix989]

> We will not see any real self driving in our generation, and may be not even after.

I think we can once we build purposeful infrastructure (think cars "on rails" with mesh-coordinated intersections).

> Second to that, just how many self driving and AI startups are plain fraud? The amount of companies getting 9 digit valuations with nothing more than OpenCV hello worlds should make people to at least scratch their heads

Argo, although lesser known (but still out of early Waymo and CMU's Robotics Institute), is every bit as competitive as the other major players. If anything, they are less bombastic than the Elon Musks of the world falsely tweeting that we would all be taking naps in our cars by last year.

[baybal2]

> I think we can once we build purposeful infrastructure (think cars "on rails" with mesh-coordinated intersections).

In that way, surely, but you will need to build a purpose built road network for that. Some self driving buses in China work like that.

New, growing cities with centralised planning can afford that, others not so much.

[Hydraulix989]

Regardless, but if we want SDCs sooner, we need to constrain the problem.

[petra]

>> We will not see any real self driving in our generation,

I agree.

But we'll be driven a large percent of trips, in the near future.

There's on-demand shared(few people in a vehicle) riding - which can be quite cheap AND fast. ridewithvia.com seem to scale with that model pretty fast. A combination of that with strong public transport systems and regulations may beat cars.

But also, a combination of partial self-driving(highway, etc), with remote control driving, could work.

[bagacrap]

I think Apple or the US govt would have won by now were that true.