ra7

It seems like the real news is Jeff and Sanjay are leaving Google, and Demis is effectively replacing Jeff as Chief Scientist for all of Alphabet.

The bigger deal is the departure of Jeff and Sanjay, rather than Demis moving into a different role.

> and thus not useful

Again, I’m not suggesting this. Bottleneck has a specific meaning. It means Waymo is limited by not having the ability to collect data. Well, clearly that’s not true because Waymo already has a reasonably scaled deployment across a dozen cities that no one else has and can handle millions of scenarios.

Real world data is absolutely required, but more of it doesn’t give you magical self driving ability as Uber’s CTO suggests. If it were the case, you’d see Tesla achieve fully autonomous driving years ago.

“Real world data is not the bottleneck” != “Real world data is not useful”

No one is suggesting the latter.

Mapping and simulation have very different purposes. Doesn’t look like you’re familiar with the basics of AV technology. Explains a lot why you’re confused about how real world and simulated data is used.

That’s literally how it works right now, so yeah.

Most AVs, definitely Waymo vehicles, are self mapping. They can detect environment changes and relay it to the entire fleet. That's because they map using the same vehicles as the fleet.

> Waymo might very well be missing specific kinds of data (e.g more incidents/accidents, near-collisions etc)

Accidents and near-collisions are exactly the kind of scenarios perfect for simulation. You don't test them out in the real world and risk injuries/deaths. You need to have confidence they're handled before you deploy.