Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow, that’s crazy. And yet totally illustrates, you never know how far away the end goal is. And this is a field that comes from the only way progress happens is through these series of breakthroughs. You don’t know: (a) how far the next breakthrough is because at any given time, there are lots of promising things in the field, most of which don’t work out. Then (b) when there is a breakthrough, actually how much lift that will give you over existing methods. So anytime people are forecasting, oh, and AI, we’re going to be able to do X, Y, Z, and X years, it’s a complete fool’s errand. Even the experts don’t know. Here are the big milestones. 2013, they started using convolutional neural nets, they could identify objects, they got much better perception capabilities. This 2013–2014 period is when Google found religion around deep learning. This is like right after the 40,000 GPUs rolled out. They’ve actually got some hardware to start doing this on now. 2016, they’ve seen enough technology proof that they think, let’s commercialize this. We can actually spin this out into a company. So Waymo becomes its own subsidiary inside of Alphabet. It’s no longer a part of Google X anymore. 2017, obviously the Transformer comes out. They incorporate some learnings from the Transformer, especially around prediction and planning. March of 2020, they raise $3.2 billion from folks like Silver Lake, Canada Pension and Investment Board, Mubadala, Andreessen Horowitz, and of course the biggest check (I think) Alphabet. I think they’re always the biggest check because Alphabet is still the majority owner, even after a bunch more fundraisers. In October of 2020, they launched the first public commercial, no human behind the driver’s seat thing in Phoenix. It’s the first in the world. This is 11 years after succeeding in the Larry 1000. And this is nuts. I had given up at this point. I was like, that’s cute that Waymo and all these other companies are trying to do self-driving, seems like it’s never going to happen. Then they actually were doing a large volume of rides safely with consumers and charging money for it in Phoenix. Then they bring it to San Francisco, where for me and lots of people in San Francisco, it is a huge part of life in the city here now. It’s amazing.…

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