[adrenalinelol]

I don't think it's comparable to Theranos. He took over a company w/a heavily (but still in a pre launch) product in its "beta" phase and was chosen for an obvious reason (get the tech into cars). He doesn't have the technical chops to understand the tech enough to know whether it's ready for prime-time or not aside from looking at metrics some of his engineering subordinates gave him.

Elizabeth Holmes didn't have a product which functioned like she claimed at all (nothing compared to the tech Waymo has already developed)... She assumed w/enough effort her ideas would eventually come to fruition, so she lied about the progress her company had made so gullible investors would fork over $$. Waymo has non-tech people trying to sell a tech which is still in development, they've made an (incorrect) assumption about when it'll be ready, as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult.

[adenozine]

Unrelated:

I like the similarity of your username to mine.

As to your point, I agree with you. I guess the comparison was meant in quite a pointed way that went over the heads of a lot of commenters here.

I was meaning to just draw attention to the fact that juxtaposing the numbers 82000 -> 600ish is quite a fantastical leap.

From what I've read about the older Waymo days, I think the leadership ideas were a lot different than what they became under Krafcik. It's hard to imagine from where I'm sitting, such a stark pivot from inside the company.

I think Krafcik probably meant as well in the claims, they need X # of vehicles and so that implies that there must be X # of agents ready to pilot vehicles or that many vehicles even ready for installation and operation/testing.

Of course they were very much further than Theranos, I guess it's just the sheer magnitude of the claims in Krafcik's place.

All this to say: I don't know anything about cars, self-driving cars, electric cars, rental cars, etc. I do know bullshit when I see it, and Krafcik was selling it like someone with bills to pay.

[ghaff]

>as I doubt anyone really thinks it's flat out impossible... just really difficult.

You see a few people saying we need AGI but yeah. I've definitely been a skeptic but mostly in the vein of it needing decades, not single digit years. And the transition to even a true L4 system is going to be hard.

That said, we seen a lot of progress and even over the past ten years, there's been a lot of progress on assistive driving system as well as field work on actual self-driving.

I suspect that machine-assisted driving will continue to get better, albeit with issues associated with humans increasingly not really paying attention. But I expect those wanting robo-Ubers will continue to be disappointed for quite some time. (And I'm not sure how much it will matter because they will have actual Ubers.)