I'm not really sure your self-driving analogy is apt here. Waymo has cars on the road right now that are totally autonomous, and just expanded its footprint. It has been longer and more difficult than we all thought, and those early tech demos were a glimmer of what was to come; then we had to grind to get there, with a lot of engineering.
I think what maybe seems not obvious amidst the hype is that there is a hell of a lot of engineering left to do. The fact that you can squash the weights of a neural net down to 3 bits per param and it still works -- is evidence that we have quite a way to go with maturing this technology. Multimodality, improvements to the UX of it, the human-computer interface part of it. Those are fundamental tech things, but they are foremost engineering problems. Getting latency down. Getting efficiency up. Designing the experience, then building it out.
25 years ago, early tech demos on the internet were promising that everyone would do their shopping, entertainment, socializing, etc... online. Breathless hype. 5 years after that, the whole thing crashed, but it never went away. People just needed time to figure out how to use it and what it was useful for, and discover its limitations. 10 years after that, engineering efforts were systematized and applied against the difficult problems that still remained. And now: look at where we are. It just took time.
I think what maybe seems not obvious amidst the hype is that there is a hell of a lot of engineering left to do. The fact that you can squash the weights of a neural net down to 3 bits per param and it still works -- is evidence that we have quite a way to go with maturing this technology. Multimodality, improvements to the UX of it, the human-computer interface part of it. Those are fundamental tech things, but they are foremost engineering problems. Getting latency down. Getting efficiency up. Designing the experience, then building it out.
25 years ago, early tech demos on the internet were promising that everyone would do their shopping, entertainment, socializing, etc... online. Breathless hype. 5 years after that, the whole thing crashed, but it never went away. People just needed time to figure out how to use it and what it was useful for, and discover its limitations. 10 years after that, engineering efforts were systematized and applied against the difficult problems that still remained. And now: look at where we are. It just took time.