Opinions on autonomous vehicles industry?
What are your thoughts on this sector? Is it worth joining now or will it be years before it takes off? Any clear cut leaders so far besides Waymo? There has been a ton of startups in this space and wanted to get a general idea of what you guys think
No hope don’t bother.
There is no doubt that electric and autonomous vehicles are the future. It’s only a matter of time, but IMO it will be fairly common place in 5-10 years. It’s going to happen ... so if you have a offer to join or invest in one from a tech perspective, I would. Or from a policy perspective, to influence law makers, etc.
Yeah, I got an offer to join a promising startup in the field and as a HW guy, the tech is definitely cooler than say, building the next gen of laptops at FAANG. Just not sure if taking a pay cut is gonna be worth it in the long run
Yes
I used to be optimistic but it doesn’t look like a near term reality anymore
Anything in particular that made you change your mind?
I don’t see AI advances beyond gradually improving perception with deep learning. In my opinion what’s missing now is not that but rather improved decision making in open field. I simply don’t see the progress in this area. I don’t think deep learning works in this field. So unless something dramatic happens we’re not going to see self driving cars in decades.
Very fundamental-level analysis: the tradeoff will be between a system that works on any legal road but not in all conditions, or a system that works in all conditions but on a "vetted" subset of roads. Because this tradeoff may be impossible to resolve, we'll never see cars that don't require a licensed driver to be in the driver's seat, at least not any time soon. What we will see is highly sophisticated cruise control. But not a driverless car.
It’s always 10 years away.