[aithrowaway1987]

The thing I wish we better understood about Waymo is how much the remote human operators are actually intervening on a daily basis - maybe I don’t know where to look, but I’ve never gotten a clear answer here. AFAICT the success of Waymo means Tesla needs to have a similar level of human oversight for its FSD vehicles. But since Waymo’s PR is all about the autonomy, way too many people have the impression that Waymo’s advantage is solely about better algorithms along with humility around limited geographical range. These are probably important factors! But I strongly suspect we don’t appreciate the human oversight.

[ahahahahah]

Their remote operators have pretty much nothing to do with the video shown, though. It's been described in detail the way that remote operators interact with the car and it's not in a way that would be particularly helpful here. You may be under the common misunderstanding that remote operators can directly control the vehicle.

[aithrowaway1987]

AFAICT it has not been described "in detail," the only writeup I know of is this vague, flowery blog post: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

> it's not in a way that would be particularly helpful here.

Why would you say that? This claim seems completely unsupported. What if the human directed the Waymo to drive more slowly and carefully than it would otherwise? That sort of instruction seems entirely consistent with the blog post and would be critical to the impressive behavior we see in the video.

> You may be under the common misunderstanding that remote operators can directly control the vehicle.

I think you are under the misunderstanding that since humans don't control the vehicle, they must have only a second-order impact on safety. But I am not concerned about self-driving's technical ability to dodge obstacles, I am concerned about its judgment around passing school buses or not slowing down when there are lots of pedestrians. It's this sort of human-level reasoning that I suspect is critical for Waymo's safety record. Nothing in Waymo's blog post / infomercial suggests otherwise.

[fragmede]

We can't appreciate it because it's unknown to the public. For Waymo's detractors, the assumption is it's AI stands for Actually Indians; for its fans, it's Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs with zero human input. The truth is somewhere in-between, but as a customer of their product, how much do I need to care? if the system requires an army of contractors to actually work, rasing costs, that's between the Waymo investor and their balance sheet. Though I guess as someone that owns Google stock I technically am an investor.

[ghaff]

Well, as I looked at my stock portfolio today, basically anyone who invests in funds even tangentially related to the tech sector, including ones with a bond component, you're in Google, Apple, Nvidia, etc, considerably.