You mention that tesla and comma have similar technical infrastructure. Tesla is doing or has done many of the caveats you describe about other companies, can you dig deeper into Tesla as a competitor?
I'm not sure what you mean by "big bang approach". There isn't a single company whose goal is 100% or nothing. Not cruise, nor waymo, nor anyone else. That's why they have things like remote assistance and incremental rollouts. Similarly, waymo and cruise are both making [small amounts of] money on their "intermediary" robotaxis right now.
http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html is contextually relevant to the point you don't understand the meaning of. They are operating in an abstracted representation of the situation related to what Paul Graham talks about. In that abstracted representation you get some not so obvious corollaries: a deep relationship between confidence and the reasonableness of default alive versus default dead strategy.
The caveats that stood out to me were that he mentions: lidar usage inflating costs, targeting ride sharing as path to profitability, and using VC money to fund non-mission goals prior to profitability. Tesla doesn't use lidar, is already profitable without having targeted ride sharing as the path to that, and is already default alive and not dependent on VC money.
- doesn't rely on lidar
- doesn't rely on pre-mapping areas
- ships intermediary products vs. big bang approach of "100% self-driving or nothing"
- makes money on those intermediary products (vs. loosing money until the big bang)
- while everyone is using Deep Learning for solving the problem, I believe Tesla is betting on DL / AI harder than most
On those big points Comma is exactly like Tesla and unlike almost everyone else.
I'm not sure which caveats you meant.