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by bigyikes 587 days ago
I’m not sure about computing hardware, but Waymo absolutely has better sensors, yes.

But it isn’t obvious to me that better sensors outperform better data.

3 comments

Isn't Waymo operating an autonomous taxi service for 100k trips per week an object example of outperformance?

Shipping working product should count!

> 100k trips per week

Now 150k trips per week (things are moving fast)

https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407

It definitely counts! I also didn’t realize the trip count was so high, that is very impressive.

The diversity of geography may be critical, though. You can only drive the Embarcadero so many times before your loss bottoms out.

It looks similar to a cable/fiber rollout where they have to onboard each region individually. I know they are currently doing this in the Atlanta metro.

Like cable/fiber, once they have good models of the business and what it costs to roll out, they have the freedom to accelerate and do regions in parallel. If the business works, I would expect them to scale the pace of rollout.

This is the root of the misunderstanding, I think. You’re begging the question.

More data does not necessarily mean better data. You can collect many more individual driver experiences, but if they do not have sufficient resolution in the necessary dimensions, they may never provide “better data.” Similarly, even if the magic data is hidden somewhere in there, if the model cannot practically extract the insight because of their sizes/disorganization vs the computational/storage capacity, this too would mean they are not better data.

Of course you can make the argument that some of the sensors are unnecessary, but when one fleet has had millions of vehicles for years and isn’t working, and one started with dozens, has recently grown to one thousand vehicles, and is working, the evidence is not in support of the argument.

Waymo has much better data than Tesla. It is just the coverage of that data that is different.