Waymo is a popular argument in self-driving cars, and they do well.
However, Waymo is Deep Blue of self-driving cars. Doing very well in a closed space. As a result of this geofencing, they have effectively exhausted their search space, hence they work well as a consequence of lack of surprises.
AI works well when search space is limited, but General AI in any category needs to handle a vastly larger search space, and they fall flat.
At the end of the day, AI is informed search. They get inputs, and generate a suitable output as deemed by their trainers.
This view of Waymo doesn’t account for the fact that self driving is about a lot more than just taking the right roads. It has to deal with other drivers, construction, road closures, pedestrians, bikes, etc.
What I wrote is exactly the opposite. Quoting myself:
> hence they work well as a consequence of lack of surprises. Emphasis mine.
In this context, "lack of surprises" is exactly the rest of the driving besides road choice. In the same space, the behaviors of other actors are also a finite set, or more precisely, can be predicted with much better accuracy.
I drive the same route for ~20 years for commute. The events which surprise me are few and far between, because other people's behavior in that environment is a finite set, and they all behave very predictably, incl. pedestrians, bikes, and other drivers.
Choosing roads are easy, handling surprises hard, but if you saw most potential surprises, then you can drive even without thinking. While I'm not proud of it, my brain took over and drove me home a couple of times on that route when I was too tired to think.
Yeah, AI has been good for a long time in limited search space areas. So good that many of these things that were called AI in the past are not called AI now, but 'just' 'algorithm'.
Everything is “just” an algorithm. LLM is a weighted graph with some randomization which is tuned with tons of data. You have input and output encoders on top of it.
I suspect that Waymo car's could operate in a lot more areas than they do. The issue is that Waymo are trying to sell the service of safe travel and not a car with an addon you can pay for which doesn't actually work.
In other words, since they accept liability for their cars it's not in their interest to roll out the service too fast. It makes more sense to do it slow and steady.
It's not really a strong argument that their technology is incapable of working in general areas.
